


I Dreamt of You Without Falling Asleep

by violet_sunset



Category: EXO (Band), Super Junior
Genre: AI Sehun, Action/Adventure, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Space, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Cyborg Chanyeol, Cyborgs, Eventual Romance, Gen, MAMA Era Powers (EXO), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rating May Change, Red Force, Space Battles, but that comes in later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-01-01 09:33:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18333338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violet_sunset/pseuds/violet_sunset
Summary: With tensions between the Greater Alliance and the sinister Red Force growing stronger by the minute, a group of unlikely heroes find themselves stranded on a failed terraforming planet through a series of mishaps. Though strife awaits them, the power of their blooming companionship might be what saves them, and the many galaxies they call home.Title from "Power" - EXO





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> In this work, there are many characters who go by their stage names or a slightly modified version of their given names. Any character who is an alien uses their stage name, and Chanyeol goes by C4N-Y30L because of his status as a cyborg.

**[chanyeol]**  
The sun has set 431 times since the last of the research shuttles left ATA-2641’s sky. Each day, C4N-Y30L cleans the solar panels so they will soak up the 18 hours of light and keep the facilities running for the 32 hours of dark, and each night C4N-Y30L attempts to sleep for longer than an hour. He isn’t sure he can, not since his brain was replaced with hardware and ever- loading knowledge. Most nights, when C4N-Y30L closes his eyes, he sees the mainframe of ATA-2641’s research base and runs checks on the systems from his bunk, back pressed to the padded wall behind his mattress. Though, it is less like seeing and more like integrating data, the way a blind person sees nothing but still feels their body as part of the world.  
  
He doesn’t feel quite real anymore. Perhaps it’s the lack of humans or even other flesh life forms to compare himself to. He is soft jelly limbs and weak human parts intermingled with old-style machinery that clicks and whirs when he’s been doing manual repairs to the base for too long. Beneath the muscle is metal vein, perforated in such infinitesimal ways to distribute blood to the cells, to the lungs, keep oxygen moving through the parts of the body that still need it. Sometimes he still thinks in human terms. 2.4 years alone on the surface of this research plant, this failed terraforming project. C4N-Y30L is bitter, often, when he recalls the team that abandoned him here, clanking around in the body they modified to obey a newly programmed prerogative. Keep the base running. Keep the systems online so the labs won’t be flagged as deserted by the Greater Alliance. Keep the team out of the Defector Records for as long as it takes for them to live out their lives elsewhere.  
  
C4N-Y30L thinks he still knows how to hate. But he can’t drag himself away from the purpose they saddled him with. Not unless someone went into his cranium and rewrote all of his software to allow for the Independence Program. 2.4 years on the surface of a dead planet. 2.4 years and C4N-Y30L has given up all hope of reprogramming, of ever seeing another human again. His slightly extended life-cycle will be long ended by the time the Greater Alliance officials come to judge the terraforming attempt. It will be a spectacular failure, he’s certain.  
  
The thought of the officials coming to ATA-2641 expecting a slowly budding society only to discover a dying research base and a deceased cyborg makes him laugh softly, but he tries not to shift too much as he inserts the nutrient IV line into his arm. There are enough nutrient packs in the base to last him five lifetimes, but no food. He sort of misses food. The process of mastication, digestion, the warm sleepy feeling of having eaten well. The IVs are efficient, but not necessarily satisfying.  
  
To his left, an alert pops up on one of the many computer screens mounted along the walls of the lab. C4N-Y30L glances at the screen and feels a very real twinge of fear for the first time in a long time. The scanners have detected movement in The Kettle. C4N-Y30L sucks in a sharp breath through his nose and slips the IV back out of his arm gently before wrapping it with a fresh strip of cloth. He ties it off and clambers to his feet. The metal one clangs against the floor, but C4N-Y30L isn’t sure he has time to drag on and lace up his boots. He sends up a quick, vaguely sardonic prayer to LU4NN, the satellite orbiting ATA-2641, that his flesh foot won’t get too torn up by the crystals around The Kettle, and takes off for the door. He snatches his rifle off the wall as he goes, clicking off the safety in case he needs to fire.  
  
The Kettle is four chambers and five corresponding door sequences away, and while it used to contain the gym equipment for the crew, it is now a hollowed shell C4N-Y30L uses to store any odd things he finds on his excursions to the planet’s surface. It is also where he keeps the main body and scattered parts of the Red Force War Machine that crash-landed outside the base 430 sunsets ago. 430 sunsets and the RF War Machine still has not woken to continue its journey, or kill C4N-Y30L for his existence in proximity to its scanners. He wonders often, as he’s lying awake in darkness, if he should dismantle it entirely and scatter the pieces around the base, but then he creeps to The Kettle and stands on the purple crystals that have formed around the RF like some protective field, and he loses all confidence in that plan.  
  
Now there is movement. Movement like awakening, or intruders. C4N-Y30L is unsure which he would prefer. Both options are equally bad. He holds his gun up at chest level as he palms through the next three door scanners. The eye-readers don’t recognize him ever since the crew replaced parts of his body with machinery, so C4N-Y30L had to rewire the base to take palm signature only. It’s a little more tedious than simply standing level with the eye-reader, and at the moment it hikes his anxiety incrementally higher every time he has to pause and fumble his rifle to gain access.  
  
Eventually, finally, he is standing outside The Kettle door. He pauses, breath caught in his throat as he listens for any clattering sounds within. Nothing comes. Only the ever-present whir of the life-support systems, and the faint beep of C4N-Y30L’s rifle revving for fire. He flattens his lips into a thin line, takes a steeling breath through his nose, and lifts his hand to the door. It beeps loudly, and the doors roll open to reveal —  
  
Total stillness. And darkness. The lights have shut off. C4N-Y30L blinks uneasily, suddenly worried about glitches in the mainframe, when he spots a flash of scattering electricity on the opposite end of The Kettle. “Enable drop-down,” he whispers, and his tech eye spins into action. It’s disorienting for a split second, but then he covers his human eye with the metal edge of his hand, and waits for the drop-down menu to appear in his vision. When it does, he selects night vision.  
  
Across the massive chamber, there’s a station rat scuttling across the sleek floor, dragging a piece of the RF War Machine’s wiring with it. C4N-Y30L is terrified to consider what it might make the War Machine do if the wiring is chewed through. “Enable rifle scope,” he mutters, and waits for the tech eye to do so. Then he lifts his gun, makes sure his systems are locked onto the body of the station rat so he won’t accidentally hit the wiring, and squeezes the trigger. The force of the blast rocks him back on his heels a little, and after the station rat is obliterated he staggers on the jagged pieces of crystal underfoot. He hears the scrape of metal against crystal, but doesn’t feel any pain in his flesh foot. He counts his blessings that this was a harmless incident.  
  
And of course, as soon as C4N-Y30L has had the thought, the War Machine makes a horrible sound. Any sound from the War Machine is horrible, truthfully, but this sound is particularly terrifying. A tinny screech bouncing off the walls of The Kettle, resonating in C4N-Y40L’s ears until he's worried he'll rupture an eardrum. He's frozen to the spot, gun still loaded and ready to fire, gut churning uneasily. It's worse that there's been nothing on his stomach in 2.4 years. He feels almost like he'll pass out. The noise continues for a few moments, then tapers off, and one the War Machine’s arms twitches. C4N-Y30L points his gun at the arm, as if a laser rifle could do significant damage to a War Machine. He waits, holding his breath, for any more movement. Nothing happens. C4N-Y30L takes a deep breath and backs away from the War Machine, tripping over crystals as he goes. He lets the door shut on The Kettle, and basks in the quiet of the hall.  
  
Peace only ever comes to him in moments like these. Brief seconds where C4N-Y30L has nothing to think about except the feeling of his feet on the ground and the rush of blood in his ears, just enough calm that the ever-swelling anxiety in his gut dissipates for a little while. He lets his arms fall limp at his sides, gun swaying against his leg in the stillness. C4N-Y30L wants nothing more than to shut his eyes, but he knows if he does he will feel the research base pulsing with life, and a headache is forming behind his tech eye. It’s been too long since a proper nutrient refuel. He sighs heavily through his nose, peace disappearing from him like smoke curling away with the wind, and turns to head for the kitchen once more.  
  
  
**[chen]**  
Chen is sitting at his work desk when the ship starts to shake. For a moment, he thinks it’s the sleep deprivation making the doc in his hand tremble, but then he registers that his chair is actually physically rattling. He frowns and looks around, and that’s when he notices the alert blaring on the main viewscreen.  
  
“Oh,” he mutters smartly, wondering how he could have missed that. He takes a deliberately slow breath and realizes he’d dimmed his auditory receptors when he began working. He twitches his ears and the sounds of the ship come quickly back to him.  
  
“Lieutenant!” comes a voice from down the long hall. Chen turns and sees Kai on the opposite end of the hall from his work station, grease smudged on his cheek and a wild look in his eyes. Kai doesn’t even spare a moment before he’s waving at Chen to follow, and he stalks off in long strides. Chen scrambles to follow, anxiety swirling in his limbs while the extra-sensory quills at the nape of his neck prickle with unease. He catalogues the sensations, his body’s own personal alert system. Usually any atmosphere habitable by humans is tolerable to him, thanks to the relatively high nitrogen concentration, though it leaves him vaguely short of breath when active because the neon percentage is devastatingly small. Right now his hearts are pumping hard, and the ship is circulating more oxygen than he can handle, probably due to hull damage. He slows his breathing down to one breath every 2.5 minutes and hopes his respiratory system gets the memo to hoard what little nitrogen it can until the crisis is averted.  
  
Once settled, Chen takes off at a light jog after Kai, not wanting to task his body more than necessary. He gets to the main hall and pauses, not quite sure which direction Kai went until he hears more shouting from the left. He bites back a sigh and trots towards the bridge, following the low angry timbre of what can only be D.O’s voice.  
  
“— telling you, for the thousandth time the problem isn’t there, Major,” D.O spits.  
  
“You have only said so twelve times, Lieutenant Commander,” Sehun replies coolly, the way he always is in times of crisis.  
  
Chen slows his pace and realizes their voices aren’t coming from the bridge, but rather from the engine room. He cuts down the hall at his left and towards engineering, where, sure enough, the voices are loudest. When he swipes his access card to the engine room, he’s met with the usual gust of hot air from the decompression chamber, but this time he is also met with a heavy plume of simmering smoke. He wrinkles his nose, glad he took a quick breath before ducking down the long metal staircase to the floor, and catches D.O’s eyes right as he opens his mouth to undoubtedly shout again.  
  
“Anything I can do to help, boys?” Chen asks, hoping to lighten the dire mood.  
  
Sehun looks at him with an expression as close as he can get to relief. More like satisfaction that there is someone present now who actually understands the navigational systems. D.O just looks like he’s going to burst a blood vessel. The velvety black fox ears atop his head twitch, and his white-tipped tail is swaying dangerously behind his knees. He also has grease smeared up his arms and on his face, and Kai is nowhere to be seen.  
  
Sehun seems to register this at the same time Chen does. “Where is the Captain?” he asks flatly, clearly irked even if he resists showing it.  
  
Chen shrugs one shoulder and enters engineering further. “He disappeared before I could catch up to him. So, what seems to be the problem here?”  
  
“Well, you see,” Sehun begins, hedging around his response.  
  
D.O, at the same exact moment, twitches his ears back and wrinkles up his nose in distaste. “Sehun here is trying to tell me the problem is in the plasma coils, but I’ve checked the plasma coils thirteen times, and there’s nothing wrong. The problem has to be in the computers, because nothing physical is causing this level of malfunction.”  
  
Sehun’s face twitches in an absolutely miniscule way that Chen might not have noticed if he wasn’t hypervigilant at the moment. He starts a slow inhale, feels his quills prickle as his body fights for the nitrogen he needs, and holds it for a long moment while Sehun speaks.  
  
“The hull damage is entirely physical,” Sehun rebukes. “The most concerning problem is that my AI cannot seem to wrangle the navigational systems.”  
  
Chen frowns and stares hard at Sehun, as if he’d be able to discern any malfunctions at a surface level. Knowing he can’t physically diagnose Sehun under these circumstances, Chen lets out a long breath as he walks up to this room’s viewscreen and types in his access code. Maybe if he had time to sit down and open up Sehun’s motherboard… but not right now.  
  
The code for the entire ship pulls up on the viewscreen, and to the topmost corner is a blueprint highlighted in the damage areas. There’s the hull, and one tiny nondescript area near the base of the ship that is likely from debris. Chen frowns and enlarges the blueprint, focuses on the damage along the hull to see if it somehow impacted the navigational computers. As far as he can tell, nothing there has been damaged. He says as much, and D.O sighs heavily while Sehun steps up to stand at Chen’s side, observing the screen.  
  
“This makes no sense,” Sehun mutters distractedly, no doubt troubleshooting internally.  
  
D.O scoffs. “I could’ve told you that,” he grouses.  
  
“Hush,” Chen chastises gently, and tries to access navigation with his own programmed emergency keys. None of them work. He stares a bit harder at the blueprint. The areas of damage are giving him heart palpitations in his primary system. Or… maybe that’s the lack of neon. He clears his throat nervously. The damage appears… intentionally placed.  
  
“Something took navigation completely offline,” Chen concludes, and cuts his eyes over to Sehun nervously.  
  
Sehun, at his official commencement for Greater Alliance service, was specifically designated to this ship and its crew, his AI linked up to the ship’s systems so he could locate physical and technical problems. He’s protected by a firewall, of course, to keep viruses that infect the ship from entering his own coding, but Chen knows all too well there are faults with such systems. If a virus has overtaken the navigational systems, there’s no telling what it could have done to Sehun’s internal coding.  
  
“Don’t look at me,” Sehun murmurs. “I’m not feeling suddenly murderous, if that’s what you’re worried about. Besides, I would have caught a foreign program long before it managed to infiltrate my firewall.”  
  
D.O comes up to Chen’s other side, ears pointed back and nearly flat against his mop of curly black hair. “Unless the foreign program originated from you,” he states uneasily.  
  
Sehun frowns and folds his arms, the most responsive Chen has seen him in a while. He typically reserves his more expressive nature for off-duty hours. The fact that D.O has provoked him this far already is saying something. “And when would anyone have had the time to implant a sabotage program in my coding, hm?” Sehun asks, sassy and just short of insubordinate. He’s lucky they all love him to death, or he’d probably get a formal dressing-down.  
  
As it is, D.O prickles visibly. “Don’t patronize me, Hunah. You chatted up at least half the Orealian Admiralty last time we docked at their air-bay. The gods only know who you might have pissed off with your meandering.”  
  
Sehun’s perfectly sculpted brows fold into an offended furrow. “I was only being diplomatic. What reason would they have to intend me harm?”  
  
D.O rolls his eyes, tail swishing hard with frustration. “You really are dense. Most of the thick idiots you exercised your diplomacy with wanted to rail you, and you didn’t spare them more than a passing conversation each!”  
  
Sehun looks helplessly confused, and turns to Chen, who is rubbing his temples with both hands by this point. “Chen, what does he mean they wanted to ‘rail’ me? Is that a human euphemism for an act of violence? Did I do something to incur violent rage from the members of the Orealian Admiralty?”  
  
Chen groans, letting slip a whole lot of valuable nitrogen in the rapidly oxygenizing atmosphere. He mentally curses himself, then slams his fists onto the flat expanse of casing below the viewscreen. “Now is not the time to argue like children,” he seethes. “The navigational systems are unreachable by the computers. Has anyone checked the warp room? A flipped switch wouldn’t register as damage, and it’d effectively block external access to the systems.”  
  
Sehun blinks with realization while D.O presses his lips into a thin, embarrassed line and averts his eyes to the nearby wall. Chen nods grimly and swipes his programs off the screen, leaving it blank and awaiting someone else’s access code. Just as he’s about to dash for the staircase, the door to the engine room wrenches open to reveal Kai cloaked by a miasma of terrifying fury. Heat waves ripple down the stairs from where he’s standing, meaning the hull fires have sparked flame in other areas of the ship. Junmyeon, Kai’s second in command, is standing just behind him looking worse for the wear than his normal sleep-deprived state.  
  
“Captain,” D.O calls out worriedly. “Are you alright?”  
  
It’s only after he asks that Chen realizes Kai is bleeding heavily from the left side of his forehead, a thick black slice through his flesh that pours inky blood over his brow and the faintly glittering gems that pebble his cheekbone. Some of it has dripped down to his shirt, staining his neckline black. Instead of answering D.O, though, Kai delivers a chilling order.  
  
“The ship has entered a critically deteriorating orbit around a terraforming project,” Kai reveals, voice thready with panic as it thunders through the room. Even the overheated, smoking machinery seems to quiet at his words. “Suit up and prepare for crash-landing within the hour.”  
  
Then he exits the doorway, and the noises of the engine room once again rises like a wave of cacophony crashing against Chen’s ears. He stands numbly with D.O and Sehun flanking him, and then Sehun takes off for the stairs at his usual stride.  
  
“Speed is advised, gentlemen,” Sehun says as he goes.  
  
D.O is the first to scurry after him, and Chen follows closely on his heels. He takes a shallow breath through the intense smoke, and prays to his family’s gods for protection on their descent. He wonders if it is futile to pray to them when he is this far away from home, but it is all he can do at this point. Helplessness settles into his bones like sickness, and he closes his prayer with a quiet rumble that is drowned out by the ship’s screeching alarms. All the better that no one heard. It has been a while since he felt the need to click and rumble out a prayer in his birth language. He wouldn’t want the others to sense his fear.


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back at base, Yixing and Xiumin become aware of the in-progress malfunction that Kai's ship has experienced.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These first couple chapters feel really slow-moving because they're mostly expository so I can world-build and lay the groundwork for the characters and how they fit into this AU. The pace picks up next chapter, and Yixing is one of my favorite EXO members to write so I hope y'all enjoy!

**[yixing]**  
Space is breathtakingly beautiful. Yixing would spend all day staring into the depths of it if he could, but unfortunately he has these bothersome things called responsibilities that he must attend to. Of course, at the present moment he is spinning around in his desk chair in an effort to avoid said responsibilities, optimizing the seat’s hover option so his legs are a good three feet off the ground while he turns.  
  
Unfortunately, Xiumin picks this exact moment to walk into the shared office. They pause in the doorway, conveying instantly their exasperation, not only with the exhausted expression on their face but also with the rush of external emotion that nudges at Yixing’s consciousness. He shivers, never quite used to Xiumin conveying feelings into his body for him to interpret, but stops spinning nonetheless.  
  
“Sorry,” Yixing murmurs, clicking the buttons on the side of the seat so the chair lowers from its unusual height and settles back at a more reasonable level so he can lean his elbows against his desk.  
  
Xiumin rolls their eyes and traipses delicately to their desk, the heavy and incredibly specific weight of having entirely too much paperwork to do and not enough patience descending over Yixing’s body in waves of rolling empathy. He hums lowly and drops his head against one hand, watching Xiumin settle into their own seat by the window. The sun cascades lovingly over their tan-warmed skin, but there is an unmistakable tension pulling at the edges of Xiumin’s etchings. The deep winding trenches along Xiumin’s forearms are not only symbols of status remaining from their homeworld, but also reliable indicators of their stress level. Yixing can’t help but wonder what caused their discomfort this time.  
  
Evidently, Xiumin is still tuned to Yixing’s thoughts, because a few moments after he has the thought, he receives the exact feeling he always gets when he’s forced into interacting with the unsavory Field Marshal Kerrigan. He wrinkles his nose in displeasure, but his mouth quirks into a smile at Xiumin’s soft breathy laughter.  
  
“That bad, huh?” Yixing asks.  
  
Xiumin shrugs one shoulder dismissively. “Pronouns,” they explain shortly. They’ve never been terribly fond of spoken language. It complicates too many easily transmittable thought patterns, they once explained. Or it dumbs them down, makes everything more contrived, less genuine. Spoken language allows for the advent of lies, of disharmony. Xiumin’s culture despises disharmony. But it is tricky with emotions others don’t experience. They can’t very well transmit the sensation of being misgendered to Yixing, who has never felt that visceral discomfort at being misidentified.  
  
Yixing’s lips pull down at the corners. “She’s so archaic, in some ways,” he muses.  
  
Xiumin bounces their head in a tired nod. Resignation pours into Yixing’s chest. He frowns at the simple conveyance. _I’m used to it_ , the transmitted feeling seems to murmur within his mind.  
  
“I wish you didn’t have to be used to it,” Yixing says sincerely.  
  
Xiumin can either hear or feel his genuine compassion, because some heady warm feeling trickles into Yixing’s chest. _Sweet_ , he can almost hear, in Xiumin’s soft lilting coo. He smiles at Xiumin, though he can feel that it doesn’t reach his eyes. It never does, when Xiumin is having a hard time. The two of them have been around each other long enough that Yixing can feel Xiumin even when they’re miles away. It would probably be a hindrance if Yixing didn’t love them enough to quite literally sacrifice himself to keep them from harm. And that isn’t even an exaggeration. Before they both took the rank promotions and the desk jobs, Yixing once tried to offer himself up to a particularly bloodthirsty rebel faction on a warring planet on the terms that Xiumin would be safely returned to the Greater Alliance’s temporary encampment. Leave it to the two of them to get stuck in mortal peril on a negotiations mission.  
  
The sudden unnatural urge to get paperwork finished and actually done well infuses itself into Yixing’s bones, and he lets out a disgusted and vaguely frightened whine when he reaches unthinkingly for his Docu. “Damn you, Xiu,” he mutters bitterly, but opens his Docu even as the external influence subsides. He sighs and starts categorizing the numerous notifs he’s received in the past two days into varying levels of urgency. There’s notifs that he labels Urgent + Important, just Urgent, and finally just Important. He commits himself to tackling them all top-down before dinner hours.  
  
“They’re serving that stewed Joraak plum cake at the ‘Fresher tonight,” Yixing remarks absently, and after a few moments hazards a glance in Xiumin’s direction.  
  
Unsurprisingly, they’ve fixed Yixing with a dangerous glare that doesn’t require an accompanying empathic transmission to decipher. Stop distracting yourself, Yixing receives loud and clear. He smiles apologetically and turns back to his notifs. He gets through the first three marked Urgent + Important before a tired groan builds in his chest and bursts past his lips as he stretches his arms above his head. “Gods,” he complains. “I should have never taken a desk job.”  
  
A sudden familiar ache pangs just below his left shoulder blade, and Yixing’s next breath stutters violently. He jerks his arms back down as his spine curls against the pain, but it lingers in paralyzing shockwaves that file up and down his trapezius. Yixing gasps, looks wild and wide eyed at Xiumin, horrified for the brief moment that he thinks they might be projecting his old pain to remind him of why he took the promotion. But then he catches their eyes, and they look just as terrified as they did when he first received the injury, and he knows this is real and not just a memory.  
  
“Are you…?” Xiumin trails off, helplessness rising in that extra pocket of Yixing’s mind dedicated specifically to whatever Xiumin is projecting to him.  
  
Yixing gulps down a breath and shakes his head. It was an explosive charge that put him officially out of commission, back about a year or more ago when he had his own ship, and Xiumin was his second in command. He had thought the mission to Earth Colony IV would be routine, but the crew was caught up in a diplomatic disaster when they uncovered Red Force cells at the tea farms. In the midst of attempting to extradite the infiltrators, Yixing was shot from afar by very early War Machine tech, and nearly died. Why the wound would be hurting him now, in this very moment, however, is entirely beyond his understanding.  
  
Xiumin is suddenly at his side, and Yixing takes a small amount of comfort in the hand that curls over his shoulder. But the pain is still throbbing in his back, deep enough that it’s impacting his breathing. He curls further in on himself and drops his head against the desk, starting to panic. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he says through gritted teeth, and Xiumin’s hand begins rubbing frantic little circles on his back, like they want to draw the pain directly out of him with their palm.  
  
Suddenly, it’s like something switches on in Yixing’s brain. Some sort of… awareness that slams into him with the speed and force of a freight train. He squeezes his eyes shut as a truly agonizing spasm begins in his shoulder and shivers its way down his arm to his fingers. He hears some sort of screeching in his head, loud and awful and so much more invasive than anything Xiumin has ever projected. He doesn’t realize tears are dripping from his eyes until the terrible sound fades, and then the pain begins to recede with every desperate breath he manages to heave. His heart is thundering in his veins, blood rushing in his ears and drowning out the feeling of Xiumin poking mentally at him, soft but insistent.  
  
“Did you feel that?” Yixing asks breathlessly, still shaking.  
  
Xiumin pats a hand at the back of Yixing’s neck and prompts him to unfurl, helping him sit back up in his chair. They lean a hip against the edge of Yixing’s desk and put their hands on his face, trying to broadcast comfort as best they can with all the concern clouding their emotional field. It works to an extent, and the grating edge of his panic disappears and is replaced with focus.  
  
“That was an empathic transmission,” Yixing mutters through the headache that is blooming in his temples and spreading into his jaw, down through the tense muscles of his neck like poison. His throat burns as if he’s been screaming. He wonders if he did, when the screech in his head was drowning out everything else. “I… did you feel it?”  
  
Xiumin shakes their head. “Not even a bit. You…” they press their lips into a line and frown, eyes glowing a tad brighter with distress. Their projections nudge Yixing’s mind, and when he lets them in, he feels… nothing. Cold nothingness, like a blank wall staring him down.  
  
“That’s…” Yixing furrows his brow and catches Xiumin’s gaze. “Is that what you felt from me?”  
  
Xiumin nods, and the etchings on their forearms writhe along their skin like live snakes, clearly displaying their visceral fear. “You felt… dead,” they admit, thumbs pressing a little too hard into Yixing’s cheekbones. He shies away, takes shuddery breaths until his chest feels a little less like collapsing.  
  
“It was a transmission,” Yixing repeats. “I don’t know from who. It was just, just screams. Or, maybe one scream. I couldn’t really tell. It sounded almost metallic.”  
  
Xiumin tilts their head in confusion. “Metallic?” they ask.  
  
“Yes,” Yixing breathes. “I know that sounds strange. I just don’t know how else to —”  
  
He doesn’t get to finish the thought, however, because the door to their office suddenly flies open and a rather frazzled looking cadet rushes in. His uniform is rumpled and he’s dripping sweat from his hairline, breathing heavily as if he ran here. “Sirs,” he spits out, and Yixing bumps his ankle against Xiumin’s when they visibly tense at the address. “We’re receiving a distress signal from one of the ships in your section.”  
  
Yixing is still feeling a little winded, but he can also feel Xiumin’s unease radiating off them in waves, so he pushes through. “Which ship?” he asks shortly.  
  
The cadet pauses a moment to catch his breath and seems to register the proximity of his two superiors, because his eyebrows twitch and his mouth opens as if to ask a question. Then he remembers himself and shakes off whatever thoughts he’d had before. “It’s Captain Kai’s ship, sir. They’ve sent us the coordinates to ATA-2641, the three-moon terraforming project on the outskirts of the Heuw planetary system.”  
  
Yixing exhales lowly. “Gods, that’s right on the Alliance border. Do we have any reported attacks to the nearby bases?”  
  
The cadet shakes his head stiffly. “No sir. In fact, the terraforming project has been sending uninterrupted updates twice every week since its commencement. There’s been nothing out of the ordinary.”  
  
Yixing blinks, feeling as though he’s remembering something, but it isn’t quite a memory he ever remembers making. He’s never seen the place before, but somehow it comes to him in a rush. Xiumin turns to look at him, subtle except for the way their fingers twitch. Yixing wonders if this is yet another transmission. He sees, at a strangely sideways angle, the open door of some Greater Alliance research facility, and a mass of glowing purple crystals at the soft corner of his vision. Standing on the rocks, silhouetted by the light from beyond the door, is a figure. Tall, features blurry from the light, but it is clear they’re holding a laser rifle. Yixing snaps back to himself quickly, just as Xiumin begins to lean towards him, mental feelers prodding at him.  
  
“Thank you, Cadet,” Yixing dismisses firmly. “I’ll look into the matter.”  
  
The Cadet salutes them both, then backs swiftly out of their office. Xiumin looks sick with worry. Their eyes are positively glittering, something Yixing might think was beautiful if he didn’t know it indicated Xiumin’s stress level. They project that same hollow, unforgiving blankness into Yixing’s mind, and it sends chills up his spine. Whatever is sending him these transmissions is much, much more telepathically powerful than even Xiumin’s empathic abilities. Enough that it’s blocking them out of Yixing’s head entirely. And why his wound started hurting… he has a slow, sinking suspicion. Red Force tech interacts with Red Force tech, no matter its age or form. The material is like a hivemind. If any residue from the attack remained in Yixing’s body, the empathetic bond he’s formed with Xiumin might exacerbate the communication between Red Force objects. He’d be seeing transmissions from the enemy. Or some piece of the enemy, at least.  
  
“What the fuck,” he mutters flatly.  
  
Xiumin conveys their agreement in a flash of feeling, folding their arms over their chest and twisting their mouth to one side. _What indeed_ , Yixing reads from their posture.  
  
“What indeed,” he says out loud, so Xiumin doesn’t have to.  
  
The silence that descends over them is, for the first time in a long time, unsettling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #xiumin and yixing are very strongly linked through xiumin's telepathy  
> #yixing can't even really tell whose emotions are whose sometimes  
> #he's like 'am i annoyed or is that u????'  
> #also catch me out here creating alien races that have more than two genders  
> #xiumin ain't know what a binary is bcuz they live on a planet with four genders  
> #also if y'all want the full run-down on xiumin's biology and planet history  
> #hit me up @bee-hospital on tumblr send me a dm  
> #my chatbox is always open  
> #also if it's unclear, the whole thing where yixing gets a vision and his wound hurts?  
> #the war machine on ATA-2461 with chanyeol sent out a radio-flare  
> #and all war machine tech received it like a message  
> #and since yixing is more open to telepathy  
> #and has war machine shrapnel in his tissue  
> #he received the message


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two stories converge, and C4N-Y30L sees the first people he's seen in years. Unfortunately, Chen and the crew are suspicious of how they find C4N-Y30L, and a questioning is in order.

**[chanyeol]**  
So much for even attempting to sleep, C4N-Y30L thinks as he sinks the IV line back into his arm, squeezing his fist once just to watch his blood bulge against the incoming fluid. He sighs when the nutrient flow begins to permeate his senses, clearing his head from the haze it was in after he left The Kettle. He glances at his laser rifle on the wall. It’s outdated and unstable. He can’t adjust for size of blast radius or force of impact the way he should be able to. When the crew left they took the update data with them. Everything runs at the level they left it at, except for the lab itself. That, C4N-Y30L has to maintain.  
  
He sighs again. If the War Machine wakes up, he could be in real big trouble. There’s no way for him to fight back, not with the outdated weaponry he has left with him. He’d be dead within minutes of the thing waking, and it’d likely have him before he even realized what was happening. Motion sensors can only tell him so much.  
  
“Fuck,” C4N-Y30L groans, dropping his head back against the wall so it thuds dully.  
  
It’s already enough that he only gets an hour of sleep every night cycle, now he’s got the chance of more nightmares. Any nightmares he’s had have been much worse in the wake of his team’s betrayal. He wakes up sometimes screaming himself raw in the throat, blood hot and brain swimming with the memory of arms barricading him down on the floor, knees gripping his rib cage, too many hands pushing his head to the ground while he thrashed and fought, and then the sickly dark embrace of sedatives. He shudders and watches as the bag drips steadily into the IV line, too similar to the lab’s med-station bags that kept him hydrated while his body integrated to its new machinery. C4N-Y30L still can’t go in there without feeling like he’ll vomit. He’s barricaded the hangar doors with various unused chairs and furnishing, as if the lab itself might come to life and chase him down.  
  
“It’s stupid,” he says out loud, lab absent of anyone else to tell him so. He refuses to talk back to himself, though. Protest his own negative thoughts for the sake of protest. That would be taking it a step too far, even if he does sometimes lie awake and formulate arguments in his head between the two sides of himself. The critical side and the side that wants to rationalize everything. One tells him he’s fucked up beyond repair, the other tells him trauma is a process and there’s been nobody to help. Of course he might be a bit weird in light of that. He wants to believe he’s fixable, but the thing is, he’s going to be alone on this planet until he dies, so it’s not like being fixed matters anyway.  
  
And like that, C4N-Y30L’s thoughts have gone from dark to utterly depressing. He blinks fast, as if he’s going to cry. Physically, that’s impossible for him now. He raises his metal hand to his face, bumps his finger pads across the ridged implants that anchor the glowing tech eye to his skull. One is stretched over the bridge of his nose and lodged in the orbital of his right eye, and the other is anchored to his frontal bone by nearly microscopic medical bolts. The surgery to anchor the tech to his human eye must have utterly destroyed his tear duct, because now he just gets a headache and hyperventilates until he calms down.  
  
C4N-Y30L ignores the sting in his right eye and takes slow, deep breaths in time with some imaginary beat in his head. He misses music. There’s no tunes left in the lab data, which makes working intensely quiet and unbearably boring. It also makes moments like these harder to get through. He breathes deep into his stomach, holds until it aches like a fist tightening in his chest, then releases as agonizingly slow as his body will allow. Just as C4N-Y30L is settling into the rhythm of his own regulated heartbeat, nutrient flow bringing him back to an alert state of mind, he picks up on some quiet sound.  
  
A low roar from somewhere unidentifiable. C4N-Y30L’s first thought is that he should have pulled the War Machine to pieces long ago, and now he’s just paying the price for his cowardice. But when the sound grows louder and the War Machine hasn’t thundered through the lab, C4N-Y30L opens his eyes and hones in on the sound. He rises to his feet, IV tugging in his skin, but he ignores it in favor of listening closely. It’s an achingly familiar sound, something he had convinced himself he would never hear again.  
  
There’s a ship in the atmosphere. C4N-Y30L turns so there’s slack on the IV line and clamps it off, tugging the needle free and tying his arm again. He’s only had two thirds of the bag, but that’s enough when there’s a fucking ship in the atmosphere. He runs to drag on his boots as the roar grows louder, and there’s the distinct blistering whir of the ship’s aero brakes cutting on. He laces them up half heartedly and then clambers to the airlock door. He pays more attention to his atmo-suit as he slips into it, making sure his helmet is latched properly and there isn’t any unnecessary strain on any parts of the suits external fabric. He switches on the atmospheric regulator and holds his breath while the interior of the suit acclimatizes.  
  
Once everything is in place, C4N-Y30L wastes no time hurrying through the airlock procedure, bouncing impatiently on his heels while the interior door seals and the outer door hisses up. As soon as there’s a tall enough gap for C4N-Y30L to duck under without risking a tear in his atmo-suit, he rushes out onto the planet’s rocky surface and squints up at the sky. The night sky is lit by the planet’s three moons, but only two are visible in C4N-Y30L’s little patch of sky at the moment. He swivels his head around, neck craned as he searches the sky for the ship.  
  
An alarm blares, and there’s an abrupt popping noise that resounds through the air like a gunshot. C4N-Y30L turns fully around and sees the ship lowering through the atmosphere, coming in at an angle and billowing enough smoke it’s evident this wasn’t a planned landing. His heart drops all the way through the stones beneath his feet, and he swears under his breath as the ship whistles aimlessly towards the ground. Luckily, the trajectory puts it on track for a stretch far removed from the base. But with a crash-landing, there are so many things that could go wrong, and C4N-Y30L really doesn’t want to watch a bunch of Greater Alliance soldiers die in a catastrophic explosion.  
  
“Please don’t crash,” C4N-Y30L murmurs pointlessly, and follows the ship with his eyes, tech eye spinning into unprompted service at the uptic in adrenaline. “Please don’t crash, please don’t crash, please don’t crash.”  
  
The ship hurtles overhead, and C4N-Y30L’s tech eye reads the hull damage, syncs to the warp emissions and sees the planned deterioration. The ship’s holding itself steady as it comes in, which means they’ve got a competent navigator. He sucks in a quick, stinging breath and holds it, waits for the telltale blast of dust and sand that will come when the ship’s thrusters displace fragments of the planet’s surface. Beat of three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and then right as C4N-Y30L is starting to worry the thrusters won’t ever come on, the top of the ground shatters like glass breaking. Bits of rock and ship debris alike fly through the air as the ship rumbles close to the ground, and then skids with the horrible sound of crumpling metal.  
  
Even at this distance, C4N-Y30L can hear the ship parts groaning and snapping. He winces, lifts his suited hands to press against the bubble of his helmet, and prays to the gods it stays mostly in one piece. “Damn,” he mumbles to himself, anxiety slamming through his body in waves as the ship begins to tilt forward onto its broad nose, coming to an ungraceful stop.  
  
A cloud of dust and smoke rises to obscure the ship as it flames, finally halting with a resounding creak and an echoing slam. C4N-Y30L watches it blankly for a moment, braced for a hope-crushing explosion, or the rapid spread of flame. None comes, and C4N-Y30L can actually see the emergency vents opening, escape panels shuddering up. He lets out a sharp breath when someone climbs out of the ship, followed by another figure, and another, and yet more. It’s almost too good to be true. Impossible.  
  
Before he realizes it, C4N-Y30L’s legs are carrying him forward, quicker and quicker until he’s jogging towards the crash-landed ship. Towards people. Finally.  
  
  
**[chen]**  
The landing is horrific. Chen does his best to tune out his hearing, but his hearts are thrumming and his atmo-suit is pumping the exact right amount of neon and nitrogen for the first time in months, and Chen almost feels high. There are shouts in his ears, Kai barking orders to hold while the ship stabilizes, Junmyeon reporting their warp emissions every half-minute, Sehun reporting damage as they rattle across the surface of the terraforming project. They’re in the escape tunnel, bodies pressed to the floor and suits already acclimatized. Chen feels a gust of heat through his suit, and when he looks back at the vents, smoke is pouring from them, illuminated by the bright orange glow of spreading fires. D.O is at his side, and he’s gripping the tunnel holds so tight Chen is worried about the strain on his atmo-suit gloves.  
  
Then they tip. All sound disappears, and for a moment Chen wonders if he’s already dead, vision spotted black as the ship prepares to roll. Something snaps close by, cutting through his deaf fear, metal smacking against the walls of the tunnel. He gasps when the ship rolls back onto its belly, screeching to an undignified halt, finally. Finally.  
  
“Oh, thank the gods,” D.O praises, and pushes up onto his hands and knees before anyone else can even move. He’s shaking from head to toe, teeth chattering over the linked headsets in their helmets, but nobody comments on it. “Get the doors open, Sehun,” he commands, staggering to the escape tunnel entrance.  
  
“Right away, Lieutenant Commander,” Sehun replies formally, also getting to his feet.  
  
Chen is the only one who stays on his belly, just for a moment, while the doors open. His blood gushes through his veins so hard it’s beginning to hurt. He breathes harshly through his nose, lets the surprisingly pale light from the widening escape panel entrance filter into his eyes and momentarily blind him. He blinks moisture out of his lashes and takes Junmyeon’s extended hand to pull himself up. Usually, the captain is the first to step off in an emergency, but D.O has evidently had enough of the ship, because he hits the ground in a crouch and turns to usher everyone else to the planet surface. Chen is last off, and he pretends not to notice the way D.O has placed a hand at the small of Kai’s back as their captain blinks against the light of the planet’s moons. There are two in the sky, and Chen finds himself grateful for the lack of sunlight in that moment. It’s a gentle balm after a crash, and he has the freedom to glance around the surface of the planet without the shimmer of heat that might be present in daylight.  
  
“Gentlemen,” Sehun says softly, with a note of curiosity in his voice. “We appear to have a welcome party incoming.”  
  
All heads snap around to peer at Sehun, then follow his gaze in the direction of a wall of glittering buildings. Solar panels layer the roof of the research base, and someone is distantly approaching them at a lilting jog. They stare for a few drawn-out seconds as the figure nears. It’s a mid-level pace, and D.O huffs a little laugh after they’ve watched the person jog closer.  
  
“You know, we could meet them halfway,” D.O points out.  
  
Junmyeon tilts his head. “I kinda wanna see how far they get.”  
  
“I kind of don’t wanna get blown up if the ship explodes,” Kai retorts weakly, clearly struggling not to slur his words from his head wound.  
  
“Fair point,” D.O murmurs, and spurs them all forward by helping Kai the first few steps.  
  
Moving at the ambling pace necessary to avoid hurrying Kai, they don’t actually meet the figure midway. In fact, they only make it about 20 yards before they’re reasonably near their odd welcome party of one. Kai is breathing hard from the walk, sounding more and more pained, but when the person straightens out of their jog and starts to slow down, his posture stiffens and the general air of authority returns to his expression. Chen casts him a wary sideways glance as Kai steps forward to greet the newcomer.  
  
Seeing as their helmets aren’t linked, Kai lifts his hands in the USL gesture for ‘hello,’ and quickly asks questions pertaining to the base via signing. The newcomer’s helmet visor isn’t tinted, so his face is plainly visible, and Chen is momentarily taken aback. He doesn’t focus too much on the conversation Kai is maintaining with the man, partly because his head is still foggy with adrenaline from the crash, but mostly because he’s busy cataloguing the stranger’s face.  
  
He’s angular, a bit too much cheekbone showing. There are deep bags under his eyes, and he’s clearly paler than his complexion should allow. It’s obvious he isn’t healthy. Malnourished, maybe. Chen studies his eyes as well. He’s a cyborg, but he looks almost slapdash, as D.O might say. Like someone took the tech parts and threw him together quickly. Surrounding the thin- frame anchors securing his glowing red tech eye to his skull are deep scars that twist and tug at his facial features. One particular scar is distinct, slicing diagonally across the bridge of his nose and into his left tear duct before diving down his cheek a few centimeters. His right orbital is actually a little sunken, upon closer observation. As if fitting the tech eye in crushed the bone.  
  
Chen is snapped out of his thoughts by the sound of Kai’s voice over the headset. He isn’t entirely sure what Kai has said, because he tuned his hearing back in near the end, but he pieces it together pretty easily based on the responses of the crew. In an instant, D.O and Junmyeon are both at the captain’s sides to support him. D.O curls a hand around Kai’s hip, and Junmyeon squeezes his shoulder to ground him. Chen turns to the stranger, knowing full well Sehun will be too busy analyzing the planetary data in his head to be of much help.  
  
Locking eyes with the man turns out to be even harder than just looking him over, for many reasons. For one, the scars surrounding his left eye seem to make it impossible for him to properly blink; for another, he has such a sweet expression of genuine concern that Chen wants to reassure him everything is fine; and lastly, he’s ridiculously handsome with the shock of startlingly white hair that falls across his forehead beneath the helmet visor, and Chen is a little worried for his own hearts.  
  
Shaking off his momentary speechless awe, Chen signs a rapid message to the man that their captain is injured, and they need to get to somewhere with a breathable atmosphere to tend to his wounds. The stranger immediately nods and waves them all towards the base, expression worried and pace staggered. He signs something halfway over his shoulder at Chen while they begin their slow journey, Kai’s feet starting to drag over the rocky terrain. Chen feels bad for not paying enough attention to catch it, and asks him to repeat himself.  
  
_Are any of you doctors?_ the stranger signs again.  
  
Chen points vaguely at D.O, and the stranger nods. It’s something of a lie. D.O doesn’t have an official medical degree by any stretch of the term, but he was held for three years as a military experiment in a corrupt branch of the Alliance that has since been shut down. The doctors there had to be good enough to keep the experiments alive, but not good enough to be virtuous, so D.O took it upon himself to learn as much as he could about medicine once he was free, so he would never be helpless of his own health or anyone else’s. It’s been useful in desperate times before, and it looks like it’s about to be useful again.  
  
The stranger gives Chen a thumbs-up and turns to face front. They walk in relative quiet, the only sounds being the residual swell of remembered alarms and wreckage from the crash still spiralling in Chen’s head, and the sobering hitch of Kai’s breathing. He sounds worse and worse as they progress, and Chen presses his lips together to keep himself from praying yet again. He feels a little dumb, but he hums a tune to himself and watches as D.O’s head twitches towards him in vague recognition.  
  
It’s the parade hymn the priestesses on Kai’s planet used to sing. He taught it to Chen months ago, when he was longing for the home he could only barely remember. Chen has never forgotten how the tune goes, and he often hums it in the low growl of his own language while working to saturate the air with a sense of calm. It seems to help some, as Kai’s breathing levels out and their pace falls into a rhythm. Even the stranger heading the procession matches their steps, though he cannot hear Chen’s humming. Kai’s priestesses may have been on to something.  
  
It is nearly an hour before they reach the airlock doors, and by that time, Kai has started to rely more heavily on the arms holding him up. The stranger goes through the airlock sequence easily, a trained hand and an almost distracted air about him. Like he’s done this by himself enough times to have it committed to muscle memory. Chen wonders what his position is on this base, if he’s a scientist or a botanist or one of the mechanics or procedural operators.  
  
The airlock pressurizes, and the interior door slides open, and the helmets are safe to come off. Chen watches as D.O and Junmyeon help Kai out of his, while Sehun wastes no time stripping out of his atmo-suit. He’s already tugging the suit off his arms and shoving it down his legs unceremoniously when Chen manages to unlatch his helmet and pull it off. He tucks it under his arm and stands only a few steps into the room, mildly wary. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else waiting for them in this room, and as far as Chen can tell, the visible barracks are unused.  
  
“What’s the access sequence for this base’s records?” Sehun asks quietly.  
  
The stranger’s own helmet is set on the only unmade bed in the entire span of the living quarters, and he looks at Sehun cautiously. Without the slight gritty quality of the helmet visor, the stranger’s face is even more striking. His skin is glistening with a pale sheen of sweat, and the faint pinch of his brow speaks to his nervousness. Chen has a vague prickling of misgiving at this entire situation, and he clutches his helmet a little closer to his side, the rim of it digging into his ribs.  
  
“It’s a physical database,” the stranger replies, and his voice is a deep sort of rasp that makes Chen’s eyes snap to his on pure instinct. It’s the sort of voice that commands attention, but not in a cloying, arrogant sense. It carries well in the wide open room. “We never got the chance to upload to the universal records.”  
  
Sehun’s eyes narrow ever so slightly. “Why not?” he asks primly. “It was practically a mandatory procedure as of last lunar year.”  
  
The stranger’s human eye widens in what appears to be shock. “T-that, I — we didn’t know that, I guess.”  
  
“You’re here alone,” Kai says suddenly, and with no hint of reservation in his tone. His weight is being supported entirely by D.O, his eyes slightly glazed but still observant enough to come to the conclusion Chen was only hedging around.  
  
The stranger blinks rapidly in apparent distress. “I’m not,” he protests pointlessly.  
  
Junmyeon gestures at the empty beds, the barren walls, the dusty floor. “No one lives here but you. Where’s the rest of the research team?”  
  
The stranger’s shoulders are creeping up into his neck, as if the onslaught of questions is a physical attack. “I — I can’t,” he stammers out, and then winces and drags his arms out of his atmo-suit to clutch the side of his head. “They, the team — I, I’m, I wish I could —” he cuts himself off and presses his lips into a thin line. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, fingers twitching as he drives the heel of his palm into his temple.  
  
Chen is more concerned than suspicious at this point. “Are you well?” he asks on impulse, and nearly regrets it when every pair of eyes turns towards him. But then the stranger shakes his head, chin tucked down and eyes on the floor, and Chen most definitely does not regret asking. “Okay,” he mutters, and casts his gaze to Kai, who is practically sagging to the floor at this point. “Let me question him alone,” Chen requests.  
  
D.O opens his mouth to protest, but then Kai makes a low whining sound, and D.O immediately turns to hold him more upright. He looks torn, but Kai drags himself up and pushes his forehead against D.O’s shoulder in exhaustion, his black blood smearing onto D.O’s uniform, and that seems to make the decision for him. “Alright,” he agrees. “I gotta handle the captain,” he announces pointlessly, as if the idea was his. “Junmyeon?” D.O prompts, looking for the go- ahead from the highest ranking officer that isn’t currently bleeding from the head.  
  
Junmyeon nods sharply. “I’ve got to help Sehun gain access to the base computers. Get a straight answer out of him,” he orders Chen, pointing with his thumb towards the stranger.  
  
“Aye, Commander,” Chen answers, and turns to look the stranger in the eye. He realizes his helmet is still an unpleasant pressure at his side. He moves to the bed where the stranger set down his own helmet and lays his down. Then he glances down at his atmo-suit, half hung across his belly. He pushes it down, drags his legs out of the bottom half, and smooths out the checkered shirt of his uniform where it wrinkled and bunched up beneath the suit.  
  
“What’s your name?” Chen asks absently as the rest of the crew scrambles to take care of their own self-assigned jobs.  
  
Chen turns to see the stranger struggling out of his own atmo-suit, and notices the way it catches on the metal joints of his left leg. The stranger clears his throat and straightens out once he’s free of the suit. “Uh, name’s C4N-Y30L. You?”  
  
“Chen,” Chen replies pleasantly. “Is there anywhere private we could talk?”  
  
C4N-Y30L nods. “The rest of the chambers are pretty empty around this time.”  
  
Chen furrows his brow. C4N-Y30L is still sticking to the script in which the other members of his research team are here. Chen chews on the side of his tongue as he follows C4N- Y30L to a door that must lead to another chamber. He watches him palm through the security panel, and together they enter a disused, dusty kitchen space. C4N-Y30L glances around nervously, wiping his human hand on the stretched fabric of his jeans.  
  
It’s with trepidation in his chest that Chen pulls out a stool to sit in. He watches C4N- Y30L do the same, eyes cast to the floor. The emptiness of the room is more apparent than before, and Chen swallows dryly. He almost doesn’t want to know what this man is hiding, what secrets might explain the mysteries he has so far seen. Whatever the answers, he’s not very sure he’ll like them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #this is a bit of a long one lads  
> #it's a good one tho  
> #also i'm,,,, rlly gay for chenyeol  
> #if y'all haven't seen their focus for playboy live  
> #specifically the performance in dallas  
> #pls.... watch her  
> #she's beautiful


	4. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yixing makes a risky decision. Is it worth it? Even he doesn't know yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for taking so long to update! Uni killed me with finals and I got 360 no-scoped by my own chronic pain but I'm back babey!!

**[yixing]**  
“I’m sorry, Yixing,” Field Marshal Kerrigan says for probably the third time. “There simply aren’t enough ships to cover a rescue mission immediately. We have to deal with the assault on the Orealian Admiralty first, and every ship and shuttle has been commissioned for refugee transport.”  
  
Yixing sighs when Kerrigan turns her back on him once again, and tries to weasel his way into her line of vision again, squishing between frantically chattering technicians and medical officers all scrambling for equipment and instruction. The Orealian Admiralty was attacked early that morning, and word has only just now reached Greater Alliance forces, right at the worst possible time.  
  
“Field Marshal Kerrigan, please,” Yixing tries, desperate but blank-faced. He has to keep up the illusion of calm if he wants to gain any ground with his superior. “We have the entire fleet at our disposal. Surely just one ship can be spared? Even a personal shuttle!”  
  
Kerrigan scoffs, the wrinkles bracketing her mouth suddenly harsh like trenches. “Don’t be dense, Yixing. You would need at least three artillery vessels and a well-trained security crew for a mission such as you’re describing. ATA-2641 is too close to Red Force space, and with this fresh assault, there’s no telling what their plans are.”  
  
Anger swells in Yixing’s belly. He opens his mouth to protest that he and Xiumin are fully capable of handling this mission alone, but then a familiar hand lands on the inside of his elbow, sliding down to circle his wrist and tug. He looks over to see Xiumin shaking their head, a wave of assurance falling into him. Trust me, he hears.  
  
Kerrigan snorts derisively at the gesture. “Good to see you still have some authority over your subordinate, Major General,” she says to Xiumin.  
  
Xiumin’s extreme dislike for Kerrigan washes through Yixing. Or maybe that’s his own emotion. It’s hard to tell when the feeling is so strong and so alike. Outwardly, Xiumin dips their head and places a hand over their heart in the Alliance salute. They don’t bid Kerrigan farewell, but Yixing spits a barely polite “Good day” as they depart the main hall.  
  
Yixing falls in step with Xiumin as they push through the doors into the maze of breezeways and stairwells, pressing his shoulder to Xiumin’s to draw their attention. “What do you have in mind?” he asks, already certain there’s a plan formulating.  
  
An image of Xiumin’s personal ship flickers into Yixing’s mind, and he twitches an eyebrow up at the mere suggestion. “Does that even have the clearance for the warp gate?” he asks. Personal ships can’t achieve warp on their own, and have to be processed through the designated Greater Alliance gate with set and approved coordinates.  
  
Xiumin rolls their eyes as if to say of course. “I faked it, obviously,” they admit aloud, unable to communicate the nuances of this plan mentally. “But it’s a rather good fake.”  
  
Yixing laughs disbelievingly. “You? Dishonest? How did you even get a fake upper level approval code?”  
  
Xiumin smiles slyly and tips their head to the side. “You remember Heechul?”  
  
“The Senator’s receptionist?” Yixing asks, already incredulous.  
  
Xiumin nods, but doesn’t further elaborate. Instead, the two of them keep their usual pace down to the ground docks, and head for Xiumin’s personal shuttle where it’s stationed. There are a few fuel bots and repair droids nearby, but they don’t cast either Yixing or Xiumin a spare glance as they board. Once on board, Xiumin wastes no time flickering on the lights and starting up his shuttle’s engines.  
  
Yixing takes his usual seat at the navigation desk, behind Xiumin’s chair against the curved wall of the shuttle. He stares at his screen as it blinks to life, lets the recognition software pick up on his face and unlock before he goes to stand at Xiumin’s side. Take-off is never bumpy with the amount of care and precision Xiumin has programmed into their shuttle, and Yixing likes to stand instead of confine himself to the somewhat uncomfortable chairs.  
  
“Why did Heechul even give you the Senatorial approval codes?” Yixing asks, still a bit dumbfounded by this revelation. “She’s always been a hardass for procedure, in my experience.”  
  
Xiumin snorts. “That’s because you intimidate her. She’s the same with Major D.O. But essentially, she’s excessively overqualified for a reception job, and I gave her the opportunity to work on some of the ships, coding for various settings and improving warp rates. It bumped up our efficiency by about 14%. She was grateful enough for the projects that she gave me approvals for practically any mission your dizzy mind could conjure.”  
  
Yixing blinks, watches the ground grow farther away as Xiumin lifts them smoothly through the atmosphere. It’s the most Xiumin has talked in months, and it’s quite a lot of information to take in. Yixing glances around. “So, when we got those mainframe updates? The ones from the Senator’s office?”  
  
Xiumin nods. “Heechul.”  
  
Yixing whistles. “Damn. Guess I owe her thanks.”  
  
“That you do,” Xiumin murmurs. “Go take your seat. I’m gonna need you to integrate the approval code with a warp trajectory before we reach the gate.”  
  
Yixing smirks. “Aye, Major General,” he says warmly, and gives Xiumin a soft pat to the shoulder before returning to the navigation desk. He groans and stretches out his arms, popping his knuckles. Coding is always enjoyable for Yixing, but it is also busy work. He rolls his neck to preempt the stiffness he already knows he’ll feel after this, and gets started.  
  
  
  
Gate traffic is not something Yixing is ever prepared for. Dead stop hovering. Yixing has his feet up on the hard titanium display, his head tipped back. The edge of his headrest digs into the nape of his neck, and he groans aloud for the fifteenth time in the last twenty minutes. “When are we going to move?” he whines.  
  
Xiumin bristles visibly in the corner of Yixing’s vision, their second-hand annoyance slipping into his veins like a heavy drug. They didn’t reply the first three times he asked, and they likely aren’t going to any time soon, but it doesn’t keep Yixing from wanting to ask. He groans again, louder and more drawn out this time, thumping the heels of his feet against the display. “Xiuuuminnnnn,” he whines. “I’m boooored, talk to me!”  
  
“Ugh, how’s this?” Xiumin growls through clenched teeth. “If you don’t shut your mouth and deal, I am going to stuff you in the airlock and keep you there until we reach ATA-2641. Is that enough talking?”  
  
An amused grin pulls at Yixing’s face, almost unwarranted. He flings himself out of his chair with entirely too much energy and walks up behind Xiumin’s chair. He bends forward and drops his chin on top of Xiumin’s head, nuzzles against their soft hair and relaxes. Xiumin is rolling their eyes. Yixing can tell by the way they huff out a little annoyed breath and tip their head back the slightest bit.  
  
“Are we there yet?” Yixing teases, pulling out the tired line with a laugh bubbling just behind it.  
  
Xiumin groans and bodily tosses Yixing off of them, slapping at his chest when he tries to duck back down. “Go sit down, Brigadier General,” Xiumin orders sharply.  
  
Yixing pulls a face. “Don’t pull rank on me, asshole.” He stands up straight and crosses his arms over his chest, brow furrowed as he stares out the viewscreen at the warp gate in the distance. There are lines upon lines of shuttles waiting to be processed. “Ugh,” he groans again, though without the intention to be annoying this time. “Not to be dramatic —”  
  
Xiumin cuts him off with a snort.  
  
Yixing blinks and stares directly down at Xiumin’s profile. “Not to be dramatic,” he says louder, “But I’m genuinely going to throw myself out of the airlock if warp traffic doesn’t move soon. I mean, what the hell sort of journey do they need to approve?” he asks sharply, gesturing at the one shuttle that’s been docked for at least ten minutes, holding up their line. “Are they processing approval for the GA’s entire airspace?”  
  
Xiumin hums a little noise. Not quite a laugh but not as frustrated as before. After a few minutes of shared, companionable silence, Yixing gets to throw his hands in the air in triumph as the troublesome shuttle undocks from the warp gate and glides out into open space, preps for warp, and then blinks out of the observable distance.  
  
“Yes!” Yixing exclaims aloud.  
  
Xiumin’s hand pats him on the back fondly, and they convey a sharp sting of tiredness that compels Yixing to sit down. He ruffles their hair in a way he knows annoys them to no end, and heads for his seat at the navigation desk. Their shuttle slides forward, just within range of the warp gate, and the navigation mainframe links up to the travel systems. Instantly, over twenty notfis from along their warp trajectory scroll down across the screen, and Yixing gives each of them a once over before swiping them away. Most of them are travel requests and cargo checkpoints, personal shuttles logging damage or interference that has already been checked and cleared. But there’s one signal in the middle, then again as Yixing deletes more notifs, and then again and again and again in a frequent rhythm spanning months. A distress signal.  
  
“Six minutes to warp,” Xiumin announces shortly, already connected to the gate with their Senatorial permissions.  
  
Yixing deletes everything except for the distress signal. There are sixteen in total across sixteen months. The most recent one was days ago. Why hasn’t anyone answered them? The more Yixing thinks about it, the more he realizes that the other notifs logged along their trajectory are all older than at least a year and a half. What transpired that the route is practically untraversed? And why would a distress signal as new as sixteen months fresh be pinging off monthly midway from here to ATA-2641?  
  
“Four minutes to warp,” Xiumin announces sequentially as they lock into the gate for proper greenlight and fuel check.  
  
Yixing pulls up the coordinates of the distress signal and thinks of the consequential drag on their mission if he routes a pitstop. He’s already writing the code in his head, so instead of doubting himself, he lets his fingers hit the keypad and begins programming a drop.  
  
The changes to the warp coding must blink up on Xiumin’s screen, because baffled panic slams into Yixing like a punch to the side of the head. _What are you doing?_ he can almost hear screaming through the pounding of his own heartbeat.  
  
“There’s an active distress signal midway through the trip,” Yixing explains. “I’m programming a dilated pitstop to investigate and make rescue if we need to.”  
  
Xiumin’s energy pulses and flares, and Yixing knows they’re one more mishap away from tearing out their own hair. Then they speak, and it’s with the most emotion Yixing has ever heard in their voice. “If you program this wrong, we are going to drop fully out of warp and I won’t be able to speed us back up. One fuck-up will set us back a whole month, Yixing, so you better know damn well what it is you’re doing.”  
  
Instead of feeling menaced, Yixing feels insulted. “I can do this,” he snaps defensively.  
  
Xiumin lets out a tense little breath and slams their palm against the console. “Fifty-seven seconds to warp, Xing.”  
  
The countdown is in Yixing’s brain, in his skin, and in Xiumin’s voice as they remind him every ten seconds how close he’s cutting it. Forty, thirty, twenty, ten (each with increasing urgency and fear). Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four —  
  
“Done!” Yixing shouts, slapping his cursor over and clicking program:RUN so the course changes integrate to their warp trajectory.  
  
“Fuck,” Xiumin swears, and then they’re entering maximum warp.  
  
Yixing watches the space around the gate blur, stretch, and then vanish. The view-screen goes dark except for a projection of their mission plan, and Xiumin stands and reaches for the controls, zooming all the way out to see if their arrival date is still the same. Yixing doesn’t even look, just watches Xiumin’s drawn up shoulders as they work. The second-hand relief that slams through him is a tranquilizer, and Yixing slumps in his chair as he lets out a deep breath he hadn’t known he was drawing in.  
  
Then Xiumin turns, suddenly all fury and positively blazing eyes, both literally and figuratively. It’s actually a little terrifying, and Yixing wonders if this is the fear of the gods people sometimes talk about. Xiumin stalks up to him, vibrating with rage. They open their mouth, clench their hands into fists, snap their mouth shut, open it again, and then settle for gritting their teeth and shaking their head viciously before stalking back to their station. Yixing is a little worried now. Xiumin isn’t even projecting anymore, too overwhelmed with whatever they’re feeling to transfer it to Yixing. He still feels their anxiety, but more as an extension of himself than a received feeling. He furrows his brow and climbs out of his chair now that their warp has stabilized. Even at max speed, it’ll take them a few hours to reach the distress signal, and hours still before they hit ATA-2641.  
  
“Xiumin,” Yixing starts nervously.  
  
“Don’t ever do that again,” Xiumin orders shakily, not even sparing him a glance.  
  
Yixing bites down on the inside of his right cheek, feeling guilty now. “I’m sorry; I knew I could make it in time. It was risky, I know. I just — Xiu, the distress signal has been sounding off for sixteen months. Ethically, it’s the Greater Alliance’s duty to help those in need. I couldn’t just leave it.”  
  
Xiumin nods. They aren’t breathing properly. They’ve never been one for surprises, or arguments. Both make them panic worse than anyone Yixing has ever met, and it isn’t something they can easily control, even after decades of living amongst the unpredictability of humans and various other lifeforms that aren’t as empathetically skilled as Xiumin’s race. Yixing notices that their hands are shaking too, and guilt strikes him even more squarely in the gut.  
  
“Xiumin,” he tries, reaching out a hand to curl over their shoulder.  
  
“Not right now, Xing,” they cut him off tersely. “I need a while.”  
  
Yixing refuses to feel hurt. He swallows around the lump in his throat and nods. It’s not personal, he reminds himself. Xiumin always needs to be alone after they have a scare. It’s a bit of a defense mechanism from the culture they were born into. Negative emotions and injuries were seen as a sign of rebellion against the grand harmony of their race. Empathic abilities were the standard on their planet, and when the advent of spoken language led to stiffer laws, punishments were developed for those who stepped out of line and caused harm to each other in even the smallest or most accidental of ways. It scares Xiumin now, to argue or be scared, to have minor injuries or feel any emotion labelled as ‘negative.’ Yixing understands, but he still feels intensely guilty. He wants to ask Xiumin to stay so he can somehow fix this.  
  
Instead, he respects their wishes, knowing that’s the only way he really can fix it. “Of course, Xiumin. I’ll monitor the mission screen, if you’d like to be by yourself.”  
  
Xiumin nods and stands from their chair. They pause at Yixing’s proximity, and as he steps back to let Xiumin through, they nudge a little spark of gentle thanks into his head. A silent reassurance that things are okay between them still. Yixing nods and smiles weakly, and Xiumin walks towards the back of the shuttle and into the private quarters. Yixing watches them go, gnawing on the side of his tongue, and then he turns his attention to the view-screen. He watches the warp trajectory as they draw closer and closer to their journey’s midpoint.  
  
“Too many unknowns,” Yixing says out loud. Something he once found enthralling, the most enticing thing in the universe. Unknowns. And now as he looks at the road ahead of him, his stomach churns with apprehension and unease. He sighs, arms folded over his chest, and settles in for the long travel ahead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #how's that for a cliffhanger?  
> #sksksks sorry  
> #don't worry I'm trying to update either weekly or every other week again  
> #depending on the circumstances of the summer  
> #i'm getting an apartment in july so I might fall off for a bit then  
> #or i might write way way way ahead  
> #and have a fuckton of content to post  
> #who knows?  
> #definitely not me  
> #i hope y'all enjoy this tho!  
> #also for anyone worrying abt xiu and xing's lil argument  
> #don't worry  
> #they are  
> #as one of my sci-fi inspirations would say  
> #t'hyla


	5. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chen and C4 learn more about each other, and why they've ended up on the same planet. Unfortunately, the base has more than a few surprises within.

**[chanyeol]**  
The kitchen is so blatantly unused. All the stove-top or chewable rations were taken when the crew departed, leaving only the IV packs and the supplementary pills. C4N-Y30L has been using the same glass of water for probably sixteen day cycles.  
  
Chen sits across from him, and C4N-Y30L gives him another once-over. On Chen’s uniform, he sports the chest badge and sleeve bands of a lieutenant, and his stature reflects this even when his vague interpretation of interrogation policy doesn’t. He sits straight up, shoulders back and chin up. C4N-Y30L notices the shiver of the extra-sensory quills on the back of his neck, and the faint glow that seems to shimmer through his skin the way blood shades human skin. He’s Bota’nik, then. His hair is a dirty blond, soft-looking even with the sweat and tangles left over from the crash-landing. His face is slim and golden, his eyes so dark they’re almost black. C4N-Y30L looks down at his hands when he realizes Chen is staring back at him.  
  
“We’ve gotten names out of the way,” Chen says. His voice is quiet, almost a purr on the elongated syllables.  
  
C4N-Y30L almost doesn’t respond. Then he looks up and sees Chen’s expectant expression and feels bad. “Uh, yeah.” He chuckles awkwardly. “Yeah, I, uh, I guess so.”  
  
Chen chews on the inside of his lip for a moment. “What rank do you hold here?”  
  
C4N-Y30L can’t help the amused snort he releases at the question. “Uh, I don’t hold rank. You see me wearin’ a GA uniform?”  
  
Chen tilts his head in confusion. “You don’t hold rank? How are you here, then?”  
  
“Somebody’s gotta be in charge of maintenance,” C4N-Y30L replies. “I made sure anything that fell apart got fixed.”  
  
Chen nods, fingers twitching like he wants to take notes. “If you don’t mind me asking, what is your species designation? Any sub-designations?”  
  
“Human,” C4N-Y30L answers immediately, then pauses. “Uh, cyborg now, too. I guess.”  
  
Chen tips his head at C4N-Y30L’s metal hand. “How long have you had those modifications? Were they surgical?”  
  
C4N-Y30L’s chest burns, and he feels his eye sting embarrassingly. He’s almost glad that he can’t cry. “2.4 years. They were… prosthetic.” For some reason, he feels like he can’t say they were replacements for limbs he didn’t need to get rid of.  
  
Chen’s lips tighten a little. “How long have you been here alone?”  
  
C4N-Y30L’s pulse quickens, and he feels cornered. “Can I ask you some questions?” he asks instead of answering, voice a bit too sharp and trembling dangerously.  
  
Chen looks taken aback, but nods anyway. “Yes, go ahead.”  
  
C4N-Y30L darts his eye everywhere but Chen’s own stare, eventually settling on the slope of his shoulder. “Why did your captain bring you through this section of space? Nobody comes here anymore.” It’s a good question. The skies haven’t pinged with any nearby ships or shuttles in nearly 17 lunar cycles.  
  
Chen looks perplexed. “We were sent on a border mission. Refugees from an invaded mining planet just beyond the Red Force boundary needed rescue. Our ship was the… the canary in the cavern, you might say. High Command didn’t pose it that way, but our captain — the one who was bleeding — he knew. We were sent to chart a path, determine if the mission was doable by an entire convoy of rescue ships. Clearly, something went wrong.”  
  
The gravitational irregularities. C4N-Y30L wonders if they just got too close to the exosphere and got dragged down. He wonders also if he should say anything about that. “What is your job on the ship?” he asks, suddenly irrationally afraid Chen will be an engineer. There is already a doctor on their crew, and that makes him uncomfortable enough. He remembers the face of his own crew’s engineer as he blacked out, the sight of the prosthetics behind him like a flash-bulb imprint behind his eyelids.  
  
“Navigation,” Chen replies easily.  
  
C4N-Y30L turns an intense stare to Chen, still unable to meet his eyes, but a fraction more confident with this revelation. “You’re a navigator?” he asks.  
  
Chen smiles kindly (blinding even in its smallness) in C4N-Y30L’s direction. “I am,” he confirms, a bit proud.  
  
Something like hope swells in C4N-Y30L’s… chest? His heart is kept steady and surge-protected by a regulator, so he isn’t sure if hope could really accumulate there. Maybe it’s pressure from how breathless he is suddenly. “You know how to program systems? Computers?”  
  
Chen nods solemnly, catching onto C4N-Y30L’s tone. “Why?”  
  
C4N-Y30L sucks in a sharp breath. “I need you to —” rewrite my prerogative. “I — I need,” he tries, but can’t get the words out. Not like he doesn’t want to, but there’s some sort of thing physically blocking him. “I need you to. Re… rewrite.” A truly magnificent headache explodes behind his left eye, turning his tongue to lead in his mouth. He’s worried for a second he’s having a stroke, but the longer he’s quiet, the less his brain scorches. Is this part of the prerogative? He can’t override the programming? Can’t even suggest an override? “Rewrite,” he chokes out desperately. “Rewrite.” It’s all he’s capable of by this point. His left hand is twitching uncontrollably where it rests against his leg.  
  
Chen’s graceful expression folds into a frown when he notices. “C4? Are you well?”  
  
C4N-Y30L growls low in his throat and brings the metal heel of his palm up to his temple, rubbing at it furiously. He elects to ignore the nickname Chen has just bestowed him with. “The bastards won’t let me ask you,” he grumbles, and is relieved when the headache gradually begins to subside.  
  
“What does that mean?” Chen asks.  
  
C4N-Y30L doesn’t want to push his luck, so he keeps his response vague, while still pushing through enough little details that he hopes Chen will piece it together. It’s all he can do, at this point, and that alone makes him want to grit his teeth. “I have a prerogative. The research team here—” butchered me. His headache worsens for one spiraling moment. “The doctor and engineer we came with modified my previously functional human body to increase my efficiency,” he spits, not withholding his bitterness. “They left me a prerogative I am not permitted to defy: Keep systems functional, keep the transmissions to the Greater Alliance running. It’s supposed to make it seem like, like…” The tech eye plunges the drop-down menu across his vision, and he wonders if it’s a glitch brought on by his defiance. “I’m supposed to make it look like they’re still here. I’m bound to this planet until I die.” The drop-down menu flashes red, and his coding pulls up. The prerogative flickers like a threat.  
  
The expression Chen returns to him is some muted version of horror. “They did this against your will? So they could… leave? Defect?”  
  
A blossoming ache unfurls lower in C4N-Y30L’s skull, spreading down to his neck. “I was sedated for the process, but yes,” he replies as diplomatically as possible. The pain already present doesn’t worsen, however. It seems that as long as he isn’t the one making the statements, he can confirm or deny whatever he wants. He remembers, as if it is happening all over again in the cold of the kitchen, the needle and the abrupt plunge into fuzzy apathy, fear bleeding away to oppressive darkness.  
  
Some of his belated grief must appear on his face, because Chen crosses to him and takes both of C4N-Y30L’s hands in his own, thumb stroking over the exposed metal metacarpals. He makes a series of clicking, humming sounds deep in his throat, and though it is momentarily unsettling, the cadence is ultimately relaxing. Emboldened by their proximity, C4N-Y30L searches Chen’s eyes for… something. He doesn’t find pity, or fear. Instead, he finds determination, and some form of lesser sorrow.  
  
Chen lifts one of his pretty, angular hands and presses the roughened pad of his thumb against C4N-Y30L’s chin, then traces the curve of his face up to the middle of his brow, clicking and purring some sort of phrase the whole way. He completes whatever he is doing with a resounding rumble and pulls back.  
  
“What was that?” C4N-Y30L asks, startled to find his voice shaking again.  
  
Chen’s smile returns, though incredibly reduced. Just a quirk of his lips. “A promise in my language. I will not abandon you here. I will not allow the others to abandon you. I bestowed it in the name of my family’s gods. The promise cannot be broken.”  
  
C4N-Y30L blinks. “Thank you,” he whispers, unsure what else to say.  
  
Chen nods. “What your crew did to you was despicable, and if we ever find their whereabouts I am determined to put them all in maximum security holding, not only for defecting but also for illegally modifying your body against your will. For now, though, we must get to fixing our ship. Would you like to rejoin the others?”  
  
Manners, C4N-Y30L hears in his head. It’s something like his voice, and something like a voice that is vaguely familiar, but attached to no memory. It’s a voice he hears often, and tries not to give too much thought to. “I should give you guys the tour,” C4N-Y30L says aloud.  
  
Chen blinks, looking a little bemused. “Tour?”  
  
“The base is big,” C4N-Y30L explains. “And there are… things you guys should know if you’re gonna be stranded here for a while.”  
  
Chen tips his head to the side in a little mock nod. “Reasonable,” he agrees, and gestures to the door behind C4N-Y30L. “Back into the fray?” It’s posed like a question, unassuming.  
  
C4N-Y30L has a bit of trouble tearing his eyes off Chen’s smile. He thinks about the promise, the way Chen’s face fell when C4N-Y30L described his prerogative. He wonders if this is where everything finally changes, but then his hand curls and his gut tenses, head aching, and he wonders if it’s even possible to be caught off guard anymore. If Chen is going to rewrite his systems, C4N-Y30L’s prerogative is going to do everything in its power to stop him, and C4N-Y30L doesn’t doubt that his programming is stronger than a whole crew of Greater Alliance soldiers. He doesn’t doubt the prerogative could probably take out the War Machine if it really wanted to.  
  
“This way,” C4N-Y30L says aloud, and rises from his stool as if to escape his own grim thoughts. He forces down the anxious bile in his belly and does his best to keep a steady pace to the door, trying not to feel like his misgivings are chasing him. He swipes back into the main chambers, then walks over to the computers along the main wall and electronically opens up the facility except for the doors surrounding the med-station and the Kettle. Those he’ll keep on a manual scan setting.  
  
Chen is watching over his shoulder, perhaps still a little distrustful. C4N-Y30L thinks he can understand that. He did just admit to having programmed and nearly unstoppable prerogatives that he himself can’t reveal to others, after all. If C4N-Y30L is lucky, Chen won’t put him under constant guard.  
  
C4N-Y30L doesn’t need to look up the locations of the others on the computer system, but he’s a bit wary of speaking to his tech installations around Chen, so he types in a search instead of giving verbal commands to himself. The locations light up on the screen a few seconds after the information has already integrated into C4N-Y30L’s brain.  
  
“Computer room and green-room,” C4N-Y30L announces as he confirms the locations of the crew. He looks over his shoulder at Chen, whose crimson-dark eyes are fixed curiously on the atmospheric readings that constantly display in the upper right corner of the screen. They aren’t promising for a terraforming project. Haven’t been ever since C4N-Y30L’s associates gave up on their mission. C4N-Y30L has an overwhelming urge to draw Chen’s attention away from those readings, bordering on an urgent need. He swallows thickly, wondering just how complicated his prerogative is going to become now that there are others in proximity. He hopes this will all end well, but it almost feels like too much to ask for.  
  
  
**[chen]**  
Chen doesn’t like the look of the planetary readings. Close to no water source except for some northern bodies and ice caps, barren permafrost for nearly two thirds of the surface, and the remaining land masses are split near evenly into sparsely vegetated craters or mountains and unfinished but clearly marked atmo-domes.  
  
“Do you think your doctor’s through fixing up your captain?” C4N-Y30L asks abruptly.  
  
Chen looks down and to the side inquisitively, only to realize how close he is to bumping noses with C4N-Y30L. He blinks, feeling his cheeks warm. He hopes he’s not glowing too obviously. “Uh — um, y-yes,” Chen stammers, feeling ridiculous. If any other Bota’nik caught him stuttering from nerves, they’d scorn him for a lack of composure and moderation.  
  
C4N-Y30L blinks up at him, a little wide-eyed but otherwise unaffected. “Alright, let’s get everyone together then.”  
  
Chen nods vigorously and stands up, shuffling backwards and allowing C4N-Y30L a wide path to depart from the computer and begin their tour. He feels like a complete fool, practically drooling over some cyborg he just met and who looks like he could take Chen out over one misstep. The way he’d twitched when he tried to talk… Chen is terrified both for C4 and himself if things were to get out of hand.  
  
He follows C4 through the gridded halls of the research base until they come upon the computer room. Sehun and Junmyeon are bent over one of the computers, shoulders touching and eyes moving across the screen in joint fascination. Sehun is no doubt absorbing all the technical data and analyzing it to see if there’s something that could help them in this situation. Junmyeon has a sort of blankness to his expression that implies he’s thinking more about the dire straits they’ve found themselves in. Catastrophizing was always Junmyeon’s specialty.  
  
“Hey,” Chen calls to get their attention. “We’re all clear,” he says in reference to C4, and waves at them to follow. “We’re getting the grand tour.”  
  
Sehun straightens up and points with a limp wrist at the screen in front of him. “There’s a chamber with severely corrupted data near the center of the base. Did part of the mainframe receive damage?”  
  
Chen can feel C4 tense up beside him, and he casts a sideways glance at him. Even in profile, C4 appears nervous. “Yeah, it’s damage, of sorts,” he half-answers.  
  
“Let’s go,” Chen urges, eager to be shown the ins and outs of the base so all this guesswork and strangeness can be explained away. “The faster you move, the faster you get answers,” he finishes, and pats C4 on the shoulder so he starts moving.  
  
“This way,” C4 mutters, jerking slightly away from Chen’s hand. It doesn’t… hurt, necessarily, that C4 rejected the touch, but Chen still twists his mouth into a tiny grimace and puts one or two extra feet between himself and C4 as they make their way down the long halls of the research base.  
  
Sehun and Junmyeon trail close behind. Chen is enthralled by the way C4 carries himself and all his coexisting tech. The fusion of machine to flesh seems haphazard at best, but C4 walks with a shy sort of authority. Like he knows his way around but doesn’t feel comfortable showing off. It’s cute. Really cute. His shoulders aren’t squared, but his spine is straight and his chin is high. Just utterly endearing.  
  
“This is the Main Hall,” C4 announces when they’re halfway down it. “It’s the central hallway of the base, and the chambers included are the computer room, the green-room, and the rec-room. The computer room is self-explanatory; it’s where we keep all our data. The green-room houses the botanical specimens we’re terraforming this planet to sustain. The rec-room is where the crew can exercise to maintain their physical strength as well as lounge around after a hard day’s work.”  
  
Chen is taken aback by the spiel. It’s like C4 code-switched and started reciting descriptions from a base manual. He takes them further down the hall until they reach the third and final chamber at the end. The doors are glass, and Chen sees the lush green and red and pink and blue of plant-life. Terran and other. Mingling branches and glowing pods. Beautiful. C4 doesn’t have to swipe them into this room. It seems he didn’t bother locking up the chambers on the Main Hall.  
  
Just inside the doors, a tangle of still-growing vines creeps along the floor panels and towards the door-frame, as if searching for space to expand. Chen carefully steps over them and spots D.O. on a bench with his med-kit at his side. Kai’s head is in his lap, and their captain’s face is now mercifully clean of inky blood. His gems shimmer in the glow of the plant pods, and his chest rises steadily on each inhale.  
  
“Everything in order?” Junmyeon asks.  
  
D.O.’s gaze snaps up as if he hadn’t noticed them enter. His tail twitches. “Better,” he allows. “My official recommendation is that the captain takes it easy for a day or two to make sure he doesn’t put too much stress on his injury, but we all know how that went over.”  
  
Junmyeon snorts and Chen suppresses his own smirk.  
  
“Not well,” Kai grumbles. He looks like a petulant child, a moment’s notice away from sticking out his bottom lip and pouting.  
  
D.O. sighs harshly and his ears flatten against his hair. “I’ll let you walk around if, and only if, you let one of us support you.”  
  
Kai’s face folds into the tiniest of scowls, but he concedes. It’s D.O., after all. Chen doesn’t think Kai could so much as raise his voice at D.O. without spontaneously combusting with shame. Chen honestly wonders how long it’s going to take those two to admit their feelings for each other. It’s getting unbearable.  
  
Once they get Kai propped up between Sehun and Junmyeon, they continue the tour through the winding base. They circle the entire outer shell of the base, past the labs where the crew might have tested biological findings, soil samples, analyzed atmospheric readings. But they all sit empty, their glass walls coated in a fine layer of dust. Chen knew logically how long C4 had spent alone, but it hits him especially hard when he sees the husks of these rooms, unused and neglected. C4 must feel the same, his body warped unforgivably by people who wanted to make him a slave to the base, forever chained to the surface by his own mind.  
  
It’s enough to make Chen’s chest ache. He tries to pay closer attention to what C4 is saying rather than the details of his surroundings. It doesn’t help much, since C4 is still reciting what Chen knows for certain now is an old manual. He isn’t sure if it’s something he’s memorized in his time alone, or if the manual is part of his programming since his tech is likely linked to the base. Neither option is preferable.  
  
“The center chambers require biological scans for access to be permitted,” C4 explains as he swipes his hand over a scanner. The door hisses open, and they follow quickly into a slightly narrower hall. It is still the same gray titanium alloy, and Chen worries he’ll get lost in here like wandering a labyrinth of monotone halls.  
  
“On the left is the med-station,” C4 says in the same flat tone as before, but this time his pace falters. He comes to an abrupt stop, prompting all of them to look towards the med-station in curiosity.  
  
The door is slightly recessed into the wall, but the most notable thing about it is the amount of equipment and spare machine parts that have been piled up in front of the chamber entrance. Like a —  
  
“Barricade?” Kai asks.  
  
C4 sighs and turns halfway to face both the barricaded door and them, as they clutter the hall like a brood of ducklings. He grimaces slightly before speaking. “That’s the med-station. It’s where I received my… modifications.”  
  
Chen is certain he’s the only one of the group who understands the full implications of that. A cursory glance to his left proves him correct, as he can say the blank stares of his crew. He realizes C4 can’t explain himself further. “C4, cover your ears,” he instructs.  
  
C4 furrows his brow and tilts his head in confusion, and Chen wonders how his crew could ever even think to leave behind someone so innocent and sweet. He hurries to elaborate so he won’t make C4 wonder. “I don’t know how far your programming will go to keep people from knowing…” he pauses, “The - the truth, I suppose.”  
  
C4’s expression becomes tense with understanding. Then he does something that Chen has not seen him do, and didn’t even know he could do.  
  
“Enable drop-down,” C4 says, and the red orb of his tech eye spins and flashes. “Enable dimmers,” C4 commands, and then: “Hearing, 0%.” His tech eye glows blindingly bright for a moment, then pulses. C4 nods at Chen to continue.  
  
It takes a moment for any of them to fully recover from seeing that. It makes some sense, that the eye would be capable of performing verbal commands, but it still makes Chen’s head spin to imagine that the very thing imprisoning C4 is his own body. Or rather, the things fused to his human body.  
  
“I was going to save the debrief for later,” Chen begins slowly, “But C4 isn’t a threat to us. His crew defected, and in order to hide their whereabouts, they fitted C4 with technological prosthetics and a programmable drive that forced him to lie about the base status.”  
  
Kai grunts his displeasure while Junmyeon raises his eyebrows in shock. “His programming, what? Prevents him from telling GA officers about the defectors?” Junmyeon asks, tone incredulous.  
  
Chen nods. “Precisely.”  
  
Sehun and D.O. share matching looks of wary disbelief, but whatever their trepidation comes from, they keep it to themselves. After several seconds of uncertain silence, Chen catches C4’s eyes and gives him the thumbs-up.  
  
“Disable dimmers, hearing at 85%,” C4 commands.  
  
Sehun immediately launches into a slew of questions about the programming and its hardware components, none of which Chen bothers to listen to. He’ll conduct his own research of the tech when it becomes prevalent to him, and when his head isn’t so cluttered by the stress of the situation. He pays half-hearted attention to the rest of the tour, focusing only when it seems truly necessary. It’s when they near the middle chamber, walled on all sides by a series of doors, that Chen senses the atmosphere change. The quills at the back of his neck twitch, as if seeking the source of the shift. But it’s just a chill and a new air of discomfort from both his crew and C4. He narrows his attention to whatever C4 is saying.  
  
“— is what I call the Kettle. I have it monitored constantly for signs of movement, because… well,” C4 trails off briefly. He glances at all their faces, clearly nervous. “The day after my modifications, I woke up in the med-station and wandered around for a while. Eventually, the computers notified me that something had breached the planet’s atmosphere. I exited the airlock to look, and I watched something crash several miles away from here. When I went to investigate, it was a War Machine. The crash had partially disassembled it, and I managed to pull the pieces of it here, where I could keep a close watch on it, and hide it from any passing Red Force ships.”  
  
Chen’s hearts are pounding and his face feels cold. “Has it ever…?” he starts, but isn’t brave enough to finish.  
  
C4 meets his eyes slowly. “Earlier today, the machine… it roared, but other than that it didn’t move.”  
  
“Let’s see it,” Junmyeon orders. “If we’re gonna be in the same space as it, I want to know what we’re up against.”  
  
“It’s been 2.4 years,” C4 defends. “It hasn’t moved once in all that time.”  
  
“We want to see it regardless,” Kai interjects.  
  
C4, despite his obvious reluctance, lets out a sharp breath and moves to the door.  
  
“Is this a good idea?” D.O. mutters to Kai.  
  
“It hasn’t moved in over two years,” Kai says. “At this point I just want to know what it looks like, so we can be prepared if anything goes wrong.”  
  
C4 swipes into the Kettle. The door clicks, a noise like a gunshot in the otherwise quiet hall. A hiss as the air from both chambers mingles, and the rapid rise of the door out of sight. True to C4’s word, there’s a deconstructed War Machine strewn in bits across the titanium alloy floor, but there’s something else as well. Something that the others might not really notice, but that sets Chen’s quills rattling with alarm.  
  
Purple crystals encrust the floor, the walls, the motionless limbs of the War Machine, creeping over every surface. Chen remembers all his years of training to be a navigator, the amount of Red Force studies he was subjected to in order to understand their coding language and the minds of their technology. He remembers nothing about these crystals. While they’re clearly growing outward from the War Machine, they’re not originated from the tech. Those crystals are coming from something else, something Chen cannot identify. And whatever it is, it’s there, hidden inside the War Machine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #this chapter felt sort of slow to me  
> #maybe not to everyone else  
> #it's very expository  
> #but things are picking up and coming together  
> #i'm really excited about the next couple chapters


	6. VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yixing and Xiumin finally discover the source of the distress signal.

**[yixing]**  
It’s been two and a half hours since they hit warp, and already the system is blinking to indicate that they’ll be slowing down soon. Xiumin still hasn’t returned from the personal quarters of the shuttle, but Yixing isn’t too worried anymore. The low hum of anxiety was replaced by a sense of calm about an hour ago, and since then Yixing assumed Xiumin just wanted space to themself for the first time in ages. They’re always surrounded by soldiers and subordinates out for praise and a job to do, and this is really the only time either Xiumin or Yixing has had more than an arm’s length to breathe since they got their promotions.  
  
“It’s like a vacation,” Yixing muses aloud, fiddling with the settings on the shuttle’s dash so their pressurizer begins to compensate for the drop-out of warp. “A really shitty vacation,” he continues, “Where I still have work to do and shit to survive and I’m breaking about fifty laws all at once and I’m fucking —” he switches the main viewscreen from coding to outlook so he can get a visual on their surroundings as they start to slow. “Fucking stressed,” Yixing concludes, finally reaching the realization that he is absolutely and utterly terrified of all the reckless decisions he’s made today.  
  
He swivels to look out the viewscreen and survey the source of the distress signal with his own eyes. It’s a Class B planet, tiny in comparison to the GA stations, and mostly water. The ship lowers towards the atmosphere, and Yixing flings a hand out to engage the ship’s preprogrammed and automatic landing program. “Holy shit,” he whispers to himself, still caught up in the realization of what exactly he’s doing.  
  
The door to Xiumin’s personal quarters hisses open, and light footsteps make their way to stop beside Yixing’s chair. Yixing registers the pleasant smell of… apricot freesia? He turns to look at Xiumin and sees that their hair is noticeably wet. His brow furrows, incredulous amusement filling up rapidly in his chest, leaving little room for his previous crisis.  
“Did you take a shower while we were at warp?” Yixing asks.  
  
Xiumin snorts and leans down to press their cold wet hair against Yixing’s neck, to which he shrieks and nearly falls backwards out of his chair. Xiumin laughs before straightening back up, pleased with themself. That’s answer enough for Yixing, and he turns his eyes back to the descent log. They’ve breached the atmosphere by now, and the shuttle is triangulating the exact location of the distress radio. The radar finally pings on a small spot of sandy beach at the edge of a sparse outcrop of trees. The planet’s ocean laps hungrily at the shore.  
  
“No signs of an encampment,” Yixing notes.  
  
Xiumin broadcasts a wave of hesitant fear over Yixing. Maybe the person they’ve come here to find is dead. Has been for months. Maybe the distress signal is set to go off at certain times, and they’re chasing a corpse. Yixing steels himself for the possibility, but rises from his chair nonetheless.  
  
“I’m going to the surface to survey,” Yixing announces. For a Class B planet, he just needs a mask and an O2 tank. Much simpler procedure.  
  
Xiumin nods and heads for their control panel. Yixing doesn’t need an empathic transmission to let him know Xiumin will be staying on board to monitor the situation and make a fast retrieval should anything go wrong. Yixing knows Xiumin will have his back, so he crosses to the hangar door and grabs a mask off the wall rack. Part of him is thrilled to be back out in the field, stepping across new ground, and the other part of him is worried about what he’ll find. He grabs a stun rifle off the wall beside the atmo-suits and slings an O2 tank over his shoulder.  
  
“Engaging,” Xiumin calls.  
  
Yixing fastens his mask over his mouth and nose as the hangar door begins the relatively noisy process of unlatching and hissing open. The shuttle is still hovering several feet off the sound, and the hum of the propellers rivals the spray of pebbled beach. Yixing blinks against the startlingly white sun, then hops out of the hangar and onto the shoreline. The water is incredibly calm. There probably aren’t many big life forms or intense gravitational satellites to cause waves, and Yixing spends a moment transfixed by the bright, nearly green glow of the surface.  
  
Abruptly, there is the sound of something erupting from the water, and Yixing swivels his head to see a sleek, tan body climbing out of a pool of froth, churned up from the disturbance of its movement. Yixing’s hand goes to his rifle, and he swiftly lifts it to point just shy of the unidentified target. Then his panicked vision clears, and he realizes the figure is grinning ear to fin-like ear, tan skin gleaming in the bright white light from above.  
  
“Finally!” the figure shouts, and splashes up onto the pebbled beach. Following closely behind is a vaguely amphibian creature that reminds Yixing strangely of a Terran feline. Its body is small and black, its pelt slick and shiny with oils, and it begins to hover around the humanoid figure’s legs as they approach.  
  
“Have you been sending the distress signal?” Yixing asks, gun still at the ready.  
  
The figure nods rapidly. Excitable. He continues to draw nearer, seemingly unaware of the rifle in Yixing’s hands, or maybe just unconcerned. He thrusts a hand out for Yixing to shake when he gets close enough, and Yixing flinches the tiniest bit.  
  
“My name’s Ba’ak Heon, he/him pronouns,” the man introduces. “I’m a cargo pilot for the General Alliance,” he explains, gesturing to Yixing’s own lapel patch that announces his rank. “You are?”  
  
“Brigadier General Yixing Zhang, he/him pronouns,” he answers as he shakes Ba’ak Heon’s offered hand.  
  
“You here for a rescue?” Ba’ak Heon asks.  
  
Yixing nods, momentarily distracted by Ba’ak Heon’s shirtlessness and the fact that his fingers, as they draw away from Yixing’s, are webbed. He’s an amphibian race, but not one Yixing can readily identify. His skin is dark, his hair is long and black, tangled with reeds from his months spent marooned.  
  
Ba’ak Heon stoops down to pluck his ocean-cat-thing out of the air and hug it to his chest. “Well, what are we waiting for?”  
  
Yixing glances him up and down. “You don’t have any other belongings?”  
  
Ba’ak Heon crinkles his nose. “Nothin’ I wanna bring. Just the shuttle I crashed in and the radio I sent signals from. Everything is pretty much trashed though.”  
  
Yixing has the sudden seizing realization that Ba’ak Heon’s only item of clothing is the ragged shorts he’s wearing right now. He clears his throat and hopes he isn’t noticeably red in the face. “You’re welcome aboard,” he states, just to make the rescue official, and gestures for Ba’ak Heon to follow as he turns and climbs up the edge of the hangar door. Once inside the ship, the hum of the engine is muted by the mostly surrounding walls. Yixing turns to help Ba’ak Heon up and out of the range of the door.  
  
“All clear!” Yixing calls to Xiumin.  
  
The hangar door begins to rattle shut, and Ba’ak Heon spins in a half-circle to observe the interior of the shuttle. Xiumin stands from their chair, and Yixing hurries to introduce the two of them.  
  
“Xiumin, this is Ba’ak Heon; he’s a cargo pilot for the GA. Ba’ak Heon, this is Major General Xiumin of the Greater Alliance.” Yixing notes that Ba’ak Heon squeezes his cat-thing a little tighter at the sight of another non-Terran.  
  
“Good to meet you, sir,” Ba’ak blurts out. “Thank you for the rescue!” He dips his head in a tiny bow.  
  
Xiumin looks like they might smile, but then their eyes land on the cat-thing in Ba’ak Heon’s arms and their expression tightens. Yixing immediately knows why, and he internally scolds himself for not remembering.  
  
“Right,” he mutters, and turns to Ba’ak Heon. “Regulation states that quadruped creatures cannot be transported on non-scientific GA ships unless approved. Do you have documents?”  
  
Ba’ak Heon’s eyes widen at Yixing’s statement, and he backs up a few steps. “I — I, no, she, she’s not a quadru— quad… whatever you called her. She’s from my home planet, she’s one of the only soul companions still alive,” he defends.  
  
Xiumin tilts their head. “Soul companions?”  
  
Ba’ak Heon nods, then lets go of the soul companion so she floats out towards Xiumin, seemingly of her own volition. The turn of her head and infrequent churning of her webbed paws in the air guide her until she is nearly nose to nose with Xiumin, who appears entranced. The soul companion opens a third eye in the middle of its forehead, and as she does so the etchings marked into Xiumin’s skin begin to writhe. Their eyes glow bright yellow with some flash of telepathic knowledge, and they reach up to touch the soul companion’s paw with their hand.  
  
“Thivi,” they murmur.  
  
Ba’ak Heon smiles and nods, though his already glossy black eyes look more watery than before. “That’s her name,” he confirms.  
  
Yixing is stunned. “Is she… speaking to Xiumin?”  
  
Ba’ak Heon turns his head to nod at Yixing. “She’s telling him who she is. She’s not a normal animal.”  
  
The glow in Xiumin’s eyes is dissipating when Yixing looks towards them again. Thivi lowers herself down to the ground to pad across the shuttle floor and under a control desk, where she rubs against the legs of Yixing’s chair, third eye blinking lazily.  
  
“She can stay,” Xiumin says. Their species doesn’t cry, but Xiumin’s etchings still wiggle a little to reveal their emotion. Yixing can feel the deep pit of sorrow that Xiumin is trying to shield from him, and wonders what Thivi told them.  
  
He resolves to ask Ba’ak Heon about a couple of things later, after he’s gotten settled in. Like what he means by soul companions, and why Thivi is one of the only one’s left, and what planet Ba’ak Heon heralds from, and why he was stranded. For now, though, he needs to get the man some clothes so he can stop staring at his bare chest and the outline of his abs and - are those gills? Yixing stares intently at the patch of skin he can just barely glimpse through the tangle of Ba’ak Heon’s overgrown hair. Yep. Definitely gills. It makes sense, but Yixing still finds himself enthralled. He’s never met anyone quite like Ba’ak Heon, not only in physical appearance but in attitude as well. It’s not every day that a victim of a crash-landing and over a year of isolation is so chipper.  
  
“Here, we have a fully functional suite in the back where you can wash up,” Yixing says, leading Ba’ak Heon towards the shuttle’s suite with a hand on his shoulder.  
  
As they pass by Xiumin, Yixing feels a teasing prod in his empathic field. He cuts his eyes at Xiumin. A warning glare. Xiumin just smirks and raises their eyebrows suggestively. It’s a monument to Yixing’s patience that he doesn’t roll his eyes in response. He has bigger things to worry about, after all. Like what they’ll find when they arrive at ATA-2641.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #yeet  
> #i'm big excited  
> #the plot is picking up and i'm ready for the good shit to start


	7. VII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Friendships begin developing between C4N-Y30L and the members of Kai's crew, and Chen considers the severity of their situation as the first day on ATA-2641 draws to a close.

**[chanyeol]**  
None of Captain Kai’s crew seem eager to talk. Not after C4N-Y30L showed them the Kettle. At the moment, they’re all setting up bunks in the sleeping quarters and, presumably, debriefing the day. C4N-Y30L is standing in the kitchen, staring helplessly at the food containment units he knows have been gutted. There’s really nothing he can give the crew to eat other than his own energy packs, which are now a spare resource. His old crew only left him the bare minimum required to survive twenty years, at most. Split between six people now, food will go quick.  
  
C4N-Y30L is so engrossed in thought that he doesn’t even hear someone enter the kitchen and approach him. He startles out of his despairing silence when a hand lands on his shoulder, and instinct sends him reeling away. When his eyes catch on Chen’s softly surprised expression, C4N-Y30L curses his body’s immediate, fearful reaction.  
  
“You’ve been in here a while,” Chen explains. “Is something wrong?”  
  
C4N-Y30L wonders if a scoff is an acceptable reply. Instead he drowns his selfish pity party in the flooding yearning he feels for human connection. “There isn’t any food left. Just nutrient packs and IV bags.”  
  
Chen nods in understanding, though his face clouds with something like anger. “That’s all you’ve had for…?”  
  
“2.4 years,” C4N-Y30L confirms.  
  
Chen glowers. “I see,” he bites out. Then a wave of forced calm descends over him, and he lets out a long breath. “Well, we’ve all been trained for disaster scenarios like this. We should be able to ration.”  
  
C4N-Y30L can’t help the panic that rises in him like nitrogen bubbles in his blood, making his ears ring and his vision tunnel. “It might not be enough for six people. Not for long, that is. It’s barely enough to last me 20 years, maximum.”  
  
Chen shuts his eyes briefly, clenching his jaw to steel himself. “I swear I’m going to hunt down your old crew and rend their bodies into ribbons,” he growls, throat clicking and rumbling in his native tongue.  
  
You and me both, C4N-Y30L wishes he could say, but even the thought makes his head hurt. Instead he redirects the conversation. “If we can find a way to fix your ship quickly, the rations won’t be a concern.”  
  
Chen nods his agreement. “Besides, it’ll only be a five-way split. Sehun is AI, so he won’t need to eat.”  
  
C4N-Y30L can feel his face stiffen into one of shock. He can recall each face and figure fairly clearly, and not one of them stood out to him as entirely machine. He doesn’t say as much, but Chen giggles at him and it’s a beautiful sound. Like wind chimes. It makes C4N-Y30L long for a life he can’t remember well.  
  
“We should join the others,” Chen suggests. “They’ll wonder what’s taking us so long,” he says teasingly, only to realize the implications of his statement and flush a shimmery gold.  
It’s C4N-Y30L’s turn to laugh, and he does so breathily. It’s been a long time since he had something to genuinely, sweetly laugh at. It feels foreign. “I gotta take a peek at Sehun.”  
  
“Mechanic’s curiosity?” Chen asks, tone light.  
  
C4N-Y30L smiles sheepishly. “Maybe,” he says with a toss of his head. He feels the warm, weird embarrassment of his own eagerness.  
  
“Been there,” Chen sympathizes, then turns towards the sleeping quarters.  
  
C4N-Y30L follows, a bit in awe of the fact that there’s really another person here with him. So many other people, all milling about the sleeping quarters. As they enter the chamber, he sees where each of the crew has claimed a bunk. The captain and the man with the tail and animal ears are sitting beside each other on a bunk, talking quietly enough that C4N-Y30L would have to enhance his hearing to catch specific words. Chen makes his way towards the youngest- looking officer sitting alone on a bunk against the far wall. C4N-Y30L trails behind. He isn’t yet comfortable talking with the crew by himself.  
  
“C4, Sehun,” Chen formally introduces them, gesturing between the two. “C4 was wondering if he could talk to you about your AI components. He’s a mechanic, so he’s interested in learning more.”  
  
C4N-Y30L is part taken aback by how blunt Chen is, and part relieved. It saves a lot of the usual human way of beating around the bush. Besides, Sehun doesn’t look offended by the proposition. Or maybe he doesn’t feel offended in general. Either way, when Sehun simply nods and scoots over on his bunk for C4N-Y30L to sit, C4 jumps to the opportunity. Almost as soon as C4 sits, Chen waves them goodbye and goes to sit with the rest of the crew, who seems to have clustered around a corner of bunks.  
  
Sehun reaches out a hand for C4 to shake, and he responds in kind. Sehun’s hand feels fleshy, but C4 knows it’s just cushiony synthetic muscle under a layer of water-resistant semiconducting nanofibrils. Still, he can’t keep his eyes from wandering over Sehun’s face and all the places where his skin meets his uniform. He seems so painstakingly human, and to be working for the GA’s army ships he must be of some importance.  
  
“So, who’s your programmer?” C4 asks.  
  
Sehun tips his head. “Currently? Or do you mean my originator?”  
  
“Your originator,” C4 replies, though now he’s curious about the meaning of ‘currently.’  
  
“Haduwig Nero,” Sehun answers, and his voice sounds proud.  
  
C4’s whole body ripples with cold surprise. “Nero? That — he… wait,” he trails off. C4 recalls that Nero was imperative to the development of learning AI models. There’s a book on the many iterations of Nero’s AIs lying somewhere around the base.  
  
“I’m his last model in the S3HN line,” Sehun explains. “Hence the human name.”  
  
C4 blinks a few times to clear his thoughts. “You’re… are you his M94?”  
  
Sehun smiles. “The one and only,” he confirms.  
  
C4 is starstruck. Series 3, Model 94 of Haduwig Nero’s GA funded project was programmed free-form and later retro-fitted to an android body, updated over time. Following Nero’s death, Model 94 became unofficial GA property on the grounds that Nero was only able to afford M94’s creation due to a grant from the GA’s technological institute. Ownership of the AI became the subject of a gruelling court battle spanning two human generations and a number of multi-galactical court systems. Eventually, he was vetted and trained for exploratory service with the Greater Alliance servicemen. The last the base’s book says of Model 94 is that his 200-year collection of knowledge and data has left him with a sense of self and purpose, and that the GA’s constitutional responsibility to allow all forms of consciousness their own free will (so long as it doesn’t directly threaten others’ free will), requires them to allow Model 94 to deactivate his service at any given time.  
  
“I can’t believe it,” C4 all but exclaims. If he had less self control, he’d probably be jumping up and down in excitement. “I’ve read all about your court case and your assignment, but I never thought I’d actually meet you.”  
  
Sehun laughs shyly, and the nuance of the action stuns C4 even more. He reigns in his own eager thoughts. He has so many questions about the things Sehun has seen, and he hopes Sehun is willing to stick around and talk.  
  
  
**[chen]**  
Junmyeon is sitting adjacent to Kai and D.O., and they’re all speaking in hushed tones when Chen approaches. He adjusts his hearing, sitting beside Junmyeon when he scoots over on the bunk.  
  
“Hey,” D.O. greets him. “We were discussing a game-plan.”  
  
“And?” Chen prompts.  
  
“Obviously the main goal is to repair the ship as best we can and somehow obtain lift-off before we all die here,” Junmyeon answers. “You find out anything about the base? Or our cyborg buddy?”  
  
Chen grimaces when he remembers the food situation. “Uh, yeah; we’re gonna have to dig our heels in and ration pretty severely from here on. The original base crew left C4 with nutrient packs and IVs. We have enough to live off for a pretty long time, but we definitely need to get off this hunk of rock as soon as possible.”  
  
D.O. squeezes his eyes shut and sighs. For a second Chen thinks he’s annoyed, but when he opens his eyes again he looks concerned instead. “The more I learn about the guy, the more I feel for him.” D.O.’s ears twitch.  
  
Not one of them is ignorant to D.O.’s reason for sympathy. His own ears and tail and altered senses were gained when D.O. joined a falsely advertised research program on a newly terraformed planet. The researchers there were doctors and scientists whose licenses had been revoked due to their unethical experimentation, and D.O.’s current form is a result of their practices on his body. His genetic sequence was melded with that of an alien life-form and they were both suspended as if in utero. Although the exposure killed his counterpart, D.O.’s genes successfully integrated the foreign strand, and he was irreversibly changed in the months before his rescue. The fact of his existence is a result of unwilling surgical interference. He and C4 have more in common than any of them could have guessed.  
  
D.O. eventually shakes his head to clear it and glares at each of them in kind. “Don’t get all weird on me, we need to focus on surviving,” he demands.  
  
“Right,” Kai murmurs. “So, what do we know so far?”  
  
“The ship is in need of repairs, though we don’t know the extent yet,” Junmyeon starts.  
  
“Alright, we’ll make a trek out tomorrow and take inventory. See the damage,” Kai says, no doubt making a mental list of objectives.  
  
“Rations,” Chen reminds them.  
  
“Rations,” Kai parrots.  
  
“We need a way to communicate with GA headquarters, and Yixing,” D.O. adds. He catches Junmyeon’s eye before continuing. “Did you and Sehun see anything about the base’s broadcasting systems when you checked the computers?”  
  
Junmyeon sighs and shakes his head in disappointment. “It’s pretty outdated tech; I mean, they were supposed to integrate to the universal records, but C4 was the only one here when the mandate came about, so it’s all physical. We could make the leap from database to universal records ourselves, but it’d take manpower and resources we probably don’t have.”  
  
Kai nods. “I’ll have Sehun run a diagnostic on broadcasting advancements tomorrow, just to see if it’s possible.”  
  
“We might not need to,” Chen realizes abruptly. “The ship is programmed to transmit a distress signal back to headquarters in the event of critical failure.”  
  
D.O.’s face lights up. “So Yixing already knows where we are,” he concludes.  
  
Kai looks apprehensive. “We went into critical failure for unknown reasons. We crash-landed, the War Machine crash-landed… If it’s something in the airway then Yixing and whatever reserves he brings will also crash-land. We’ll be at least seven mouths to feed, assuming he brings Xiu, and even more body weight to carry off in a half-busted ship.”  
  
Chen feels the full weight of their situation settle in his gut. He shudders, and the exhaustion of the day begins to catch up to him. “It’ll take a lot to get home, that’s for sure. But we can’t give up on it,” he finishes. “In the meantime, I think we should all get some rest. We’ll be able to problem-solve better on a night’s sleep.”  
  
“Agreed,” Kai says. He stands from D.O.’s bunk and lays a hand on the ladder leading up to his own. “We’ll discuss a ration plan in the morning. Set your watches to wake up in eight hours.”  
  
“Will do,” Junmyeon says, and Chen takes that as his cue to climb up to his bunk, which lies above Sehun’s.  
  
He heads that way, making sure to hold up a hand to ensure C4 and Sehun he isn’t interrupting. Once in his bunk, Chen adjusts his hearing to the lowest level he can without eliminating sound, then sets his watch alarm. C4 and Sehun talk a few minutes longer, and then C4 rises from the bunk and sets about turning off the room lights. In the near dark, Chen can almost picture the vast expanse of space he’s so used to seeing from his room’s window on the ship. He misses his room, and his bunk with his favorite quilt, and all his personal effects. He hopes some of them survived the crash. For now, though, Chen settles underneath the thin sheet he managed to scrounge up from the stores a few hours ago and forces his eyes shut. The base is cold, but the wall at his back is warm from the heat of the computers within as they work to keep the base running. He curls his knees up and crowds closer to the wall as he drifts off.  
  
Hopefully, in the morning, things will start looking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #sorry for the late update  
> #gonna be probably monthly from this point on  
> #gettin into a rough spot of business  
> #and then school's gonna start up in august so that'll rlly screw me  
> #but never fear  
> #i'm still intensely dedicated to this fic  
> #comments are appreciated!


	8. VIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yixing and Ba'ak Heon get the chance to learn a little more about each other, but their conversation is cut short by seemingly imminent disaster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for how spread-out updates are becoming! I'm very busy these past few months, and school is starting up again this week so I'm a bit scattered. I promise not to leave y'all hanging for very long though!

**[yixing]**  
  
A half-hour out from arrival, all three passengers of Xiumin’s shuttle have gathered in the main bay to await landing. Yixing’s old wound seems to throb with fresh pain every few minutes, and he wonders if it’s because they’re approaching Red Force space. Xiumin is tapping at their computer, absorbing every reading as it flickers past. Ba’ak Heon is opposite Yixing on one of the lone lounge seats, his legs pulled up onto the cushion and his knees tucked under his chin.  
  
Yixing is tired of this stomach-churning silence, so he rises from his flight chair and heads over to where Ba’ak Heon is sitting. He steals a spot beside him and reaches a tentative hand out to where Thivi is curled in a small ball between them.  
  
“Can I?” he asks.  
  
Ba’ak Heon smiles and nods. “She likes being pet.”  
  
Yixing gently strokes the tips of his fingers along Thivi’s back, feeling the thick fur that covers her. Thicker than any other animal Yixing has encountered. He lays the palm of his hand flat and rubs her side methodically, watching as she stretches out to allow him more access. Her webbed toes stretch and Yixing sees that she has large talons underneath each foot-pad. Her two tails stay closely pressed to her body, and for good reason. At the end of each are sharp barbs that Yixing hadn’t noticed when he first saw her. She has such a friendly demeanor, and yet she’s so intensely guarded. It makes Yixing wonder about Ba’ak Heon.  
  
“Where did you say you two are from?” Yixing asks.  
  
Ba’ak Heon’s arms squeeze around his legs a little. “I didn’t,” he says with a tense, breathy laugh. “But, we’re from Ania’n, in the Zeta Ekklesia system.”  
  
Yixing only knows the name from old news reports. He remembers a reported black hole, a rescue mission, a race of people nearly killed not only by the destruction of their planet, but by a hive-mind who ruled the planet’s surface for thousands of years, forcing Ba’ak Heon’s people into either a life of slavery or a life of hiding underwater. The hive-mind was excommunicated from the Greater Alliance for their crimes back when Yixing was still a teenage volunteer, but their damage to Ba’ak Heon’s race had been done. Only a scattered four hundred remain alive.  
  
“You have any family we should contact?” Yixing asks.  
  
Ba’ak Heon smiles wanly. “Just Thivi,” he answers. His voice is hoarse, but his answer feels practiced when it reaches Yixing’s ears.  
  
Yixing nods, feeling bad for bringing it up. He blows out a long, slow breath to lessen some of the tight awkward energy sitting in his chest, but luckily Ba’ak Heon saves him when he clears his throat and speaks.  
  
“Tell me about where you’re from,” he says with a soft smile. “Since everyone already knows about my planet.”  
  
Yixing’s chest fills with warmth when he remembers his home-station. “I grew up on one of the minor stations out on the far edge of GA Air Space. Station 16, Region 2.”  
  
Ba’ak Heon squints as if trying to imagine it, but comes up empty with a shrug. “I don’t think I’ve been there.”  
  
“Well,” Yixing starts, “It’s mainly greenhouses and food manufacturing. I grew up on the northside of the city, by all the factories. My moms both worked in packaging, so we weren’t rich or anything, but the station paid for our housing. I used to play on the fire escape with the neighbor’s kids, and we got into all sorts of trouble just wandering around the shops and messing about the loading docks. We didn’t have any major star systems near us, so the station was artificially lit up, and at night the ceiling of the station would power off and you could see out through the glass and into the far away stars. I used to try and count them out my window while I fell asleep.”  
  
Ba’ak Heon hums pleasantly, his face soft. “Sounds like a nice childhood,” he says. “So peaceful.” The last part comes out quiet, as if Yixing wasn’t meant to hear it.  
  
Yixing can’t imagine what Ba’ak Heon’s life was like. The hive-mind enslaved every member of Ba’ak Heon’s race that they could find. To spend his whole childhood in hiding on his planet’s ocean floor… it must have been hellish. But instead of asking about any of that, Yixing tries to think of what connects the two of them. So far, nothing. Yixing quickly thinks back over the questions he’d been compiling on the first leg of the trip.  
  
“What did you do to get marooned on a planet on a dead trade route?” Yixing asks.  
  
Ba’ak Heon’s upper lip curls back in a sneer. “Shipwide malfunction. All I know is one minute I was fine, following my usual trade route and bringing cargo back from some of the border planets, and then the next minute my computer couldn’t make heads or tails of anything around us. I tried to regain control, but we were on a crash-course and I knew if I didn’t eject the emergency pod, Thivi and I would end up pieces of the nearest nebula.”  
  
Yixing’s mind starts to race. He glances over at the viewscreen, checking for any system alerts. This route has been deserted for nearly as long as Ba’ak Heon has been marooned, meaning something was wrong enough that word spread locally and cargo ships that frequented the route found work-arounds. Now Kai’s ship has gone down on a nearby terraforming planet with minimal warning. All of this happening so close to the border between GA space and unchartered territory leaves a pit of dread in Yixing’s stomach that he’s too frightened to even voice. He worries that if he speaks it, he’ll make it real.  
  
Unfortunately, Yixing doesn’t worry for very long. Before he or Ba’ak Heon can say another word, the shuttle’s alarm system kicks in. The overhead lights switch off so only the interior track-lights remain, all systems diverting power to the nav-board and the thrusters. Yixing barely has time to think before instinct settles into his limbs and drives him for his control panel.  
  
“What’s happening?” Ba’ak Heon shouts, and something (presumably Thivi) trills anxiously from where he’s still seated.  
  
“I don’t know,” Yixing replies, mouth on autopilot as he tries desperately to grasp onto anything his nav-board is telling him. All the alert symbols are blurring together, and the gridded map on Xiumin’s screen is fractured like a shattered pane of glass. The auxiliary atmosphere tanks deploy, filling the cabin with a hissing stream of unnecessary oxygen. Yixing knows what is happening, but he prays against his own knowledge that this will end and their shuttle will stabilize. Ba’ak Heon has other plans, however.  
  
“Emergency pod!” Ba’ak Heon screams into Yixing’s ear. When did he get there? “Now! Where is it?”  
  
Yixing looks frantically across the shuttle deck to see Xiumin struggling over their own panel. His heart leaps as his stomach lurches and he searches Ba’ak Heon’s face for any sign that this is different than his own crash. That this can be rectified before it’s too late. Ba’ak Heon’s deep black eyes are round and pleading, his chest rising and falling rapidly with each panicked breath. His body is tense, ready to run, triggered into fight or flight as the familiar sounds of shuttle failure surround him. Yixing nods, and for the first time in his entire career, he abandons his post.  
  
“Major General!” Yixing shouts, knowing it will get Xiumin’s attention better than their name, “Abandon post, to the emergency pod now!”  
  
Xiumin twists around, their feet planted but their jaw slack with fear. Resistance curls off their frame and into Yixing’s mind, but he fights it. “If we don’t leave now, we’ll all die,” Yixing says lowly, knowing that Xiumin can feel the urgency of his sentiment more than hear it.  
  
With one last wistful if not frantic glance at the interior of their shuttle, Xiumin nods and abandons their station. “This way,” they announce firmly, and hurry past Yixing to guide their slap-dash crew of three towards the emergency pod.  
  
In private shuttles, the emergency pods are really only fit for two people, partially to conserve square footage on the craft, but mostly because a personal shuttle is meant for individual leisure, not vacationing and certainly not for missions. So when the emergency pod airlock finishes its rushed decontamination sequence and the three humanoid crew squeeze into the tight confines, getting Thivi to remain calm becomes a primary focus.  
  
“Can you get her talons away from my face?” Yixing asks while Xiumin programs a brief flight trajectory in the direction of ATA-2641.  
  
Ba’ak Heon tries to tuck Thivi under his arm, but she rumbles and squirms. Her eyes begin to glow a vibrant, ominous purple, and she bares her several rows of teeth as Yixing’s heartbeat ramps up and the emergency pod rattles loose from the main body of the shuttle. The sound of the metal walls scraping against the entry point of its dock sends Thivi into a rage which apparently involves levitating forcefully out of Ba’ak Heon’s desperate grip and slamming into the ceiling upside-down, digging her talons into the metal roofing.  
  
“Oh, Christ,” Yixing mumbles, and praises every deity he can still name that the ceiling of the emergency pod is quadruple-reinforced.  
  
Ba’ak Heon stares up at Thivi with a disapproving grimace. Yixing takes an entirely selfish moment to appreciate the sharp edge of Ba’ak Heon’s jaw-line and the elegant slope of his neck while he isn’t looking. After all, Xiumin is muttering about the pod being a last-ditch effort, and if Yixing isn’t long for the world he’d like to indulge in at least a bit of gazing.  
  
“She’ll probably stay up there until we land,” Ba’ak Heon muses.  
  
“If we land,” Xiumin corrects him hoarsely.  
  
All humanoid eyes in the shuttle turn immediately to Xiumin.  
  
“Meaning?” Yixing asks, though he’s sure he knows the answer.  
  
Xiumin throws up one hand in a cramped gesture of defeat. “Nav’s fried. Coordinates might work, might not.”  
  
Ba’ak Heon’s gulp is audible. “So we’re just…”  
  
“Hurtling through space with no way of telling where we’re headed,” Yixing concludes.  
  
Xiumin bobs their head as their eyes blaze and the etchings on their arms writhe so frantically that Yixing can see them shifting the fabric of Xiumin’s uniform shirt. Ba’ak Heon scoffs humorlessly and throws himself backwards to lean against the wall.  
  
“Well this is just great,” he spits bitterly. “I get rescued by the only two idiots in the universe who are trying to get closer to the source of whatever interference is crashing every ship in its path! Just my luck.”  
  
Yixing prickles. “We’re trying to save our friends,” he corrects. “I risked a damn lot plotting a pit-stop to pick you up on the way.”  
  
“Well, I’m starting to wish you hadn’t, because now we’re gonna die in this tin can of yours, and I’ll never know why Thivi —”  
  
“Shut up!” Xiumin barks, stopping Ba’ak Heon in his tracks and sending a jolt of reprimand down Yixing’s spine.  
  
Immediately, Yixing feels scolded. He ducks his head and takes a swift breath to regain his composure before turning to face his superior. Xiumin’s eyes are glued to the miniature nav-board built into the wall beside them. “We’re approaching ATA-2641’s orbit.”  
  
“Did the coordinates stick?” Yixing asks half-rhetorically.  
  
Confusingly, Xiumin shakes their head. “Our computer can’t tell up from down. Something is pulling us in from the planet.”  
  
Yixing crowds Xiumin in as he tries to catch a glimpse of the nav-board. “What, like the planet’s core? Do you think it’s magnetic?”  
  
Xiumin sends Yixing a doubtful look, then transmits an intense sense-memory of the initial ATA-2641 briefing. Yixing rakes through his memories of the report. “No, not a broad enough magnetic field,” he mumbles to himself. He combs a hand through his hair and leaves his palm flat against the back of his neck. Think. Think. “All surface reports normal until now. Or maybe too normal. As in, every report fit the projected monthly parameters to the letter. Every terraforming attempt has its discrepancies, but this one… it was too perfect. And we let it slide, got too cocky. We should have known it was too good to be true, too manufactured.”  
  
“Yixing, what are you saying?” Ba’ak Heon interrupts, shuffling closer.  
  
“Something went wrong on the surface,” Yixing decides. “Red Force fleets must have invaded, or maybe they sent a weaponized probe. I’m not sure, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. I mean, this close to the border? And along a GA trade route, no less? With limitless access to GA computer systems and database records?”  
  
Ba’ak Heon looks paler, suddenly, though maybe it’s the harsh lights of the pod as they shine across his high cheekbones. “We could be headed into enemy territory, you mean.”  
  
Yixing doesn’t want to affirm the suspicion, but he feels he has to. “It’s a possibility, yes, and it would explain the system failures in both your ship and ours.”  
  
“And Kai’s,” Xiumin adds.  
  
Yixing blows out a long breath and looks back to the nav-board, where he sees they are quickly approaching the surface of ATA-2641. “Well, I suppose we should prepare for landing.”  
  
Xiumin and Ba’ak Heon join him in watching the countdown on the nav-board. As the numbers tick down on the screen, the three fall into a fearful silence broken only by the labored breathing of one soul companion, still latched to the ceiling of the escape pod. Beyond the walls enclosing them, the frenzied yet muted expanse of space gives no promise or threat of what is to come. Only resounding silence and the promise that no matter the fate of the pod’s inhabitants, it will continue on for more wordless eternities than any of them can fathom, even as they confront the possibility of soon meeting their respective deities.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #this was one of my favorite chapters to write so far  
> #i just rlly like writing characters in high-pressure situations  
> #because it gives me a chance to explore how they act when faced with danger/stress  
> #plus i high-key love thivi  
> #i dropped some minor hints towards plot points i intend to expand upon  
> #and please leave comments!  
> #even if i'm not able to reply i love reading each and every one of them

**Author's Note:**

> This is something I've been working on forever and a day, so a lot of this is backlogged content I can post while I write and edit.  
> Updates every Tuesday/Wednesday 💌


End file.
